“I fucked it up,” I said, dropping an allen wrench to the floor.She came closer to inspect the monstrosity. “No you didn’t.”

“Yeah, this part was supposed to go over there.”

“Was it?”

“If it wasn’t, why would I be taking the whole thing apart?”

She returned every couple of minutes to check on my progress, offer me a cup of coffee, something to eat, or a beer. The final straw was when she told me to take a break. I threw a screwdriver and it stuck in the wall. We didn’t speak until after dinner. “You know you have to fix the wall, right?”

“Yes,” I nodded, staring down at the trimmings of fat on my otherwise empty plate.

“Do you know how?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, like, how you knew how to assemble the bassinet?”

I peered up from the plate, and took a long sip of wine. “No. Believe it or not, I put quite a few holes in the wall as a kid.”

“And you fixed them?”

I nodded. “And I fixed them.”

I took my time doing the dishes. The warm water, the suds, the repetitive motion and minute task of removing burnt gristle from a pan pulled me away from the lingering ire and once that chore was complete, I wiped down the table and the counter as if the kitchen’s next patron could award our humble inn a Michelin star. I even vacuumed to give myself more time to prepare an explanation. With a fresh glass, I went into the living room where Meghan was lying on the couch, hands on her belly. “I’m sorry,” I said. She glared at me, I pleaded, she called me an asshole, and told me to get her a snack.

I had been with Meghan for ten years, married for three. The pregnancy was the unintended, unimagined, unfathomable consequence of a hangover so severe that reaching into the nightstand drawer, removing a condom, opening the package and then applying it to my member required far too much effort and dexterity for our aching, shaking hands. It wasn’t until afterwards, lying on our sides in a spooning position, that I became slightly concerned. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, smoke billowing from her parched lips. I took the weed pen from her, hit it, and put my worries away until weeks later when she emerged from the bathroom holding a pregnancy test. “Shit,” she said.

“Fuck. No, no, no. No fucking way. Try another.”

She drank about a swimming pool’s worth of water, then tried again. When it was done, she shuffled from the toilet with slumped shoulders and looked me dead in the eye. “What the fuck did you do to me?”

Neither of us considered ourselves qualified candidates for parenthood. The first thing we did was look up how to get an abortion pill. She made a few phone calls and found one she thought was best, but decided to sleep on in it. I woke up to find her writing in a previously untouched daily planner. “What’re you doing?” I asked.

“I’m marking down all the days I’ve been drunk in the past two months.”

“What,” I said. “Why?”

“I figured…I don’t know. I mean, if I didn’t want to take that pill, what would you think?”

I didn’t know what to think, so I stammered for a few seconds, kissed her and hugged her. “Should we make a doctor’s appointment?”

Maybe we felt too old to claim negligence, or had subconsciously wanted a child all along…I don’t know. I never didn’t want a child in the same way I never didn’t want to be an astronaut. Sure, it’d be great. But those sorts of responsibilities should be retained for intelligent, or at least mature, people. 

After the doctor’s appointment, we went to a nearby park and sat on a bench. We looked at the ducks sticking their butts in the air, and a swan floating along as if it ruled the world. “If nothing else,” she said, “it would get my parents to shut up.”

“Mmm. It would give me something to talk about with mine.”

And that’s how we decided to have a baby.

We both wanted a girl and that’s what the doctor told us we were getting. We were happy. Meghan asked if we could name her Hannah. Hannah it was. 

At night, we sat around and talked about our Hannah between dog-eared pages of Happy Baby Sleep Baby, Baby Bites, and You’d be Happier if Your Parents Read This Book. There were genetic preferences – Meghan’s thick brown hair, green eyes, general intelligence and, for some reason, my fingernails – and more practical considerations.  “I was thinking purple,” Meghan said one night, wedging her highlighter between the pages of Baby Bums and Tum Tums, “for Hannah’s room. What do you think?”

“Fine with me. We can go to Home Depot tomorrow.”

“Pink is too…You know, pink.”

“I don’t like pink, either.”

We went to Home Depot and mixed paints until Meghan got the shade she wanted. The pimply twenty year old working in the paint department held the color chart next to the can. He wanted to say something, but I tapped his shoulder and shook my head. He grinned and asked if there was anything else he could help us with. We went home, laid down some tarp, set the edges with blue tape, put on a primer coat and then, the next day, painted. Or, I painted. The smell made Meghan nauseous, so she sat near an open window in the hall and blasted Nirvana, Richard Hell and early Strokes albums. I sang along and drank a couple of beers. When I was done there was paint on my hands, on my jeans and t-shirt. “Not so bad,” I said. “It’ll get a bit lighter when it dries.”

“I hope she likes it.” 

“She’ll like it.”

We sat on the floor, watching the paint dry. It was less boring than rumored to be. Meghan rested her head against my side and I put my hand on her belly. “It never kicks when I touch it,” I said.

“I hope she likes purple,” Meghan said. “It was my favorite color.” 

“Maybe it doesn’t like me. Or, I’m really good at putting it to sleep.”

“Maybe she doesn’t like being called ‘it’. Have you thought of that, dumbass?” Meghan sighed and shook her head. “What if she hates us and the color purple? And we go our whole lives forcing things on her because we like them, or we think we know what’s best for her and she ends up hating us…”

“That won’t happen,” I said. “Worst case – she becomes a little goth and…The goth kids were always nice. Weird, but…There’s worse things than My Chemical Romance.”

Meghan put her hand on mine. We rubbed her belly together. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “I mean, I was a goth kid for a little bit…We played ‘Black Parade’ five times at my sweet sixteen.”

I started laughing. “You had a sweet sixteen?”

“Of course I had sweet sixteen!” 

“You never told me that! Are there pictures?”

“Probably! Ask my mom.”

I leapt to my feet, trying to remember where I put my phone, but Meghan tugged on my arm until I fell back to the floor.  “Nooo!” She screamed. “Absolutely not. You can’t see that!”

She didn’t let go once I settled down. A gust of wind came through the window and the tarp rippled on the floor.  “What about you?” she said. “Tell me something embarrassing.”

“From when I was a kid? I think you know it all.”

“I can’t know it all. Think!”

I leaned my head against the wall and looked at the ceiling. I wondered if Hannah would like those glow-in-the-dark stars so many children have in their childhood bedrooms. “Is bed-wetting genetic?”

She turned to look at me. “What? Did you wet the bed?”

“Until I was twelve. Thirteen, maybe.”

“Twelve!?”

“Ten,” I said, shifting against the wall. I felt my muscles tighten. “I don’t know. I was too old. Way too old.”

Megan took the smile off her face and rested her head against my shoulder. “Did you get in trouble for that? I read that you shouldn’t yell at a bed-wetter. So, if it’s genetic, because it can be…but it isn’t necessarily, then we can’t yell at Hannah if she wets the bed.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“I know,” she said, and squeezed my arm. “I love you. You know that, right?”

“I love you, too. Can we talk about something else now?”

She told me some more about her sweet sixteen and her prom, which she didn’t want to go to either. As she talked, I realized I had heard all this before. But that was alright. I liked hearing her stories and when she told them, I imagined I was there so it was as if we were remembering them together and I had never been without her. “It was fun, though. Mom was right, I guess. But…I don’t know. The whole time I was like, Who’s this for? You know?”

I nodded, “Yeah, I know.”

“So…I hope Hannah likes purple.”

“Mmm. And if she doesn’t, it’s a good thing her room is pink.”

“What?” 

“That’s pink. Lilac, maybe, but not purple.”

Meghan leaned in, as if a few extra inches would change the color. “Shit.”

She sat in the doorway again as I spackled the wall. She was impressed I knew how to do it. “I told you so,” I said. “What’d you do with the paint?”

“Doesn’t it need to dry?”

“Yeah, I’ll get the paint out now so I don’t forget.” When I got back upstairs she was staring at the white splotch of spackle. I said nothing and sat on the stool.

“You can’t be throwing things once she comes, you know?”

“I know.”

“Have you always done that?”

“What?”

“Thrown stuff.”

I sighed. “We’ve been together for how long? How many times have you seen me –”

“When you were younger, I mean.”

I sighed again, and started mixing the paint with the wooden stick. “Often enough that I learned to spackle.”

“And it has happened while we’ve been together. Not often, but –”

“I’m aware,” I snapped. A silence ensued. Truthfully, I wanted to throw something.“It won’t happen again,” I said, and stood to walk out of the room. She blocked my way and raised up on her toes. She placed a kiss on my cheek.

The room came together as her belly grew and grew. I cut back on the drinking and began going for long walks in the morning where I did nothing but think and breath. We read more baby books and discussed them over dinner or during episodes of Sex and the City. I wasn’t brave enough to suggest another show…I learned how to cook and fold laundry the way she liked it. We saw friends we had written off for dead years before when they had children of their own. Somehow, their advice made Meghan more nervous. She’d stay awake at night, worrying about a future we could barely see. “We have to get her into a good daycare. That can impact the kind of preschool she gets admitted to and –”

“I’m trying to sleep, Babe.”

“Cara told me they start testing for these things at, like, two years old and it goes on their record. If we want Hannah to go to a good school, then we have to –”

“Not Now!” I snapped and pulled the sheet up to my neck. She huffed and puffed and scrolled on her phone. I tossed and turned. “Go to sleep,” I said. “You’re working yourself up.”

“Don’t tell me to go to sleep.”

“Well the fucking light is so goddamn bright that I –”

“Don’t curse at me!”

“Then go to sleep! Turn off your phone! Stop worrying about preschool for a baby that’s a month from being born!”

I rolled over, slamming my head against the pillow. I breathed and counted and thought of whales swimming in the ocean but the sheets were too hot and the phone was too bright and – “Goddamnit!” I sprang out of bed and stomped to the couch.

I woke up a couple of hours later. A weak light came through the window. Meghan was sitting in the crook of my waist. “I’m sorry,” she said.

I rubbed my eyes and sat up. “No, I am. It’s just…I get nervous when you start talking about things so far off…”

“I know. I shouldn’t worry so much, but I guess I can’t help myself.”

“Still, I shouldn’t get angry.”

“You didn’t break anything.”

“That’s true.”

The couch was not big enough for two people. We slept anyway.