{Grave Danger}: Nothing Punny Here

“Are you shitting me?” Harlowe says, her face morphing into a sneer as she stares at Cash sprawled on the ground below her, grass stains marking his jeans, dirt visible on his skin through the threadbare knees.

“What?”

“You know what,” she says through gritted teeth, pointing her Sperry sneaker out at him. “This is what you define as an emergency?”

“I mean.” He unfolds his arms from the corpse-like position on his chest to motion to the Halloween set-up around him in the backyard. Plastic headstones he found in his parents’ basement while searching for hedge trimmers are behind him, along with “weapons” he and his brother had played with when they were younger: swords, maces, and shields.

“I am in grave danger.”

In his mind, he’s channeling Harry Potter’s dramatic Professor Trewlaney, but it comes out as a terrible British accent that usually would make Harlowe crack a smile. Not today.

Wrong move. Very wrong move.

“Seriously? You’re using puns?” Harlowe only takes a half-step towards him, but it’s enough for her shadow to cast over Cash, imposing like the Grim Reaper he was mocking. “I sprinted out of the store because I thought something had happened to you. That you’d gotten hurt trimming the trees or something, not for some damn pun.” Her eyes sweep from his feet to his forehead to the headstone he placed above his head. “But, of course, why would you think about that?”

Cash can admit her logic is sound. When he talked to Harlowe this morning, he told her he was doing lawn work around the house to help out his parents since they’ve been working long hours on a case at their firm. So, it’s not a reach for her mind to have gone to the worst. But, while he may not have thought of that, the reason he’s here, sitting on a burlap sack he’d thrown down with the hope of making the grass look more like a fresh grave, is because all he has done this morning is think.

He thinks about her. He thinks about them. He thinks about what is dying between them.

“Hey.” Pressing his hands into the blades of grass, Cash stands on the rough patchwork cloth. “Lowe, I’m sorry.”

She scoffs, swinging her purse onto her elbow, and turning towards the driveway where he can hear her old VW bug rumbling. “Whatever.”

“What? You think I’m not actually sorry?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“But you’re saying something.” He inches towards her and wants to touch her, pull her into his arms, and somehow make that touch convey everything he wants to tell her, feelings that have become second nature but are too complicated to speak out loud. But he can’t, not when a fingertip to a shoulder could set off an emotional trip wire.

She looks back at him, her tongue pinched between her teeth like she does when she’s angry or about to cry. In this situation, he thinks it’s both. “I’m saying you don’t really care about me.”

The answer stops him short. “What? You don’t think I care about you?”

“You always apologize, but you never think beforehand of how what you’re doing is going to affect me. I’m an afterthought and I’m sick of being an afterthought in every aspect of my goddamn life.”

“Lowe, I—” It’s a punch to the gut combined with a knee to the groin, leaving him emotionally hunched over and gasping for air. He knows they’ve been treading water for a while, trying to keep their heads above the waves. At times, they’ve held onto each other to stop the other from going under. In others, they’ve forced each other beneath the tide to save themselves. But, she’s never laid it out like this—that he’s been the weight tied around her leg, pulling her under. Even worse, he’s not the only one.

“I hate that you think that,” he says. “You’re not an afterthought. You’re top of mind for me. That’s why I did this.”

Harlowe’s eyes widen as she looks past him. “How is this for me? Scaring me to get me here?”

Cash’s hand juts out, slapping the air behind him.

“Because you like Halloween! Because The Haunted Mansion is your favorite ride! Yeah, I shouldn’t have said it was an emergency, okay? That wasn’t my brightest idea, but I did this because I thought you would like it. I thought it would make you laugh and maybe smile again.”

But it didn’t. Now, Cash wonders if it’s become near-impossible for him to elicit any sort of happiness from her anymore. “You know, while we’re airing emotions, I don’t feel like anything I do is good enough.”

“Cash, come on,” she says, but there’s not as much anger as it once was. It’s quieter, sadder maybe, and also he can’t help but feel that there’s a recognition of truth. “Because I got upset about this you’re saying that?”

“It’s not just this. You know it’s not just this.” It’s the exhaustion that comes from duking it out with interns for post-grad work to clock out and start a new fight that’s all the more draining. It’s questioning how their paths that had once seemed so intertwined have unraveled. It’s the dashed hopes of returning home from college and thinking he’d find all as it was, but really, it’s changed—or maybe he has. It’s the fact that physical distance between them has shrunk to blocks, but the emotional distance has become thousands of miles.

It’s the weight he can feel around his ankle, too, bringing him down inch by inch.

Harlowe’s response comes slowly, first a blink, followed by a frown and her chin dropping to chest. Truth again.

They stand on the lawn, angled away from each other, ready to walk away, but staying as rooted as the 200 year-old across the yard. Cash realizes he was right when he told her he was in grave danger, but it’s not just him, it’s them, their relationship. He doesn’t speak, and neither does she, as if they’ve both recognized whatever comes out of their mouths next could carve a headstone and put them both in the ground.