There’s always something that gets in the way, that keeps him from doing the things he needs to do.
Right now, for instance, he should be mowing the lawn in front of the house he lives in with his girlfriend. The house is the first place they’ve rented together, both of them on the lease, and the front lawn is a fraying rectangle of green beyond the big living room window; the grass is taller than his ankles, is just about mid-shin, so he should definitely be out there with the gas-powered Toro his brother has permanently loaned him.
But it’s raining, so what can he do?
He looks out the window, watching fat drops batter the yard and explode against the asphalt street defining the lawn’s far edge.
“Sounds like it’s coming down pretty hard,” says his girlfriend in the kitchen. She’s slicing onions on a wooden board, her chef’s knife moving swiftly and precisely as the bulbs divide. Next, she’ll place the onion pieces in a pan with some olive oil, cook them until the sugars have caramelized and the onion bits, limp and translucently amber, can be layered atop the pork chops she’s got in the oven.
“It’s a fucking slaughterhouse out there,” he says. He exhales a patch of steam onto the window’s pane, uses an index finger to make the two dots and wide arch of a sad face.
“No mowing for you today,” she says, scraping onion into the pan.
“Yeah,” he says, “definitely.”
The curved slices sizzle as they hit the oil. “You should’ve done it this morning.”
“Who knew it would rain?” he says, and instantly regrets it. His girlfriend had checked the weather report as she did each morning, part of her waking-up routine along with the yoga and the cold shower, and she’d made a point of telling him that there was a greater than 80 percent chance of rain that afternoon.
“I told you,” she says now, stirring onions.
“Yeah,” he says, watching the downpour. “Yeah, you did.”
Why had he said that, who-knew-it-would-rain?
Because he wanted her to humor him, he realizes. He wanted her to pretend that she’d never mentioned the forecast. He wanted her to lie to him — to lie to herself, even, if that’s what it took — to revise reality in order to validate his question and thus, by extension, his current lack of lawnmowing. To cut him a little slack, for fuck’s sake. Isn’t that what love was supposed to be about, after all? Denying yourself for someone else? Didn’t she love him anymore? Didn’t she love him enough to —
“Aw, no worries,” she says, lowering the flame below the onion-filled pan. “Another day won’t make that much difference. The jungle can wait, right? Fuck it.”
“Yeah,” he says, “fuck the jungle. The jungle can fucking wait.”
“Fuck that fucking jungle,” she says.
“And the photosynthesis it rode in on,” he says, stepping away from the window.
She smiles, shakes her head. Tends to the onions.
The rain continues falling.
Puddles form a network across the drowning lawn.
The oven timer goes off, signaling the pork chops’ completion.