The porch

"In the rain everything makes sense," she said to me from underneath a small white umbrellas sprinkled with black polka dots. We'd been talking for a while about sadness, or something like it. More correctly, she'd been talking about a dog of hers that had died when she was very young, and how she'd stayed up all night crying. Or what felt like all night. It seems implausible that the was up the entire night.

I was talking about what it felt like to be twenty seven in this town. About how all the women were looking for dads or lovers. I don't suppose she really heard a word I said what with the tears about that old damn dog of hers. Women are always telling me stories about things they've lost. I suppose that's because I do my best to listen.

The cars are rolling past at thirty in a thirty five. Her nose is a bit longer than I like, but I don't say anything. "That's the impossibility of it," I say. "Of what?" she asks. "Of life," I tell her. "Weren't you listening to what I've been telling you?" She wrinkled up her nose in disgust.

The problem, as I said before, is that no one listens to me. I've got a wealth of information just ready to spring its way into the world, but nobody gives a damn except about what they've been thinking of, what new coupon or haircut or online dating site they've recently discovered. "The world has no time for philosophy," I tell her. She rolls her eyes.

"The world has no time for one of your monologues," she says, hailing a cab and stepping out into the rain.

"Whether tis nobler in mind..." I start, but she doesn't even crack a smile. Nobody knows their Shakespeare anymore. She's gone just like that, and I'm now standing in the rain with a monologue trailing on through my head. Nothing much makes sense in the rain. It's a degenerate sort of weather that would bring out the worst in even the best of us, and I am so far short of the best that it hardly seems worth the effort to continue.

I got home and took a hot bath. I know that men aren't supposed to take baths anymore, that as soon as we lost the ability to have the butler draw one it was time to stand in the damn shower like a fool. But I'm old fashioned, and I enjoy taking a long bath, drinking a cold beer, and thinking about all the ways that people disappoint me.

My brother was a world class screw up who'd managed to hide it all behind a good job at the hospital, a nice wife, and two happy kids. I hated him for a while, but it's sort of dropped off now into a drizzly type of pity. The Cubs are down four in the seventh because the Cubs are always down even when they're up. I think about calling Bernice and asking her some more questions about her dog, stretching an old phone cord into the bathtub and just listening to her remember. To hell with it.

The bath has gone cold and a light rain is tapping at the window. The neighbor, some vaguely Eastern European woman is watching a game show at decibels that reach through the floorboards. I think about going upstairs and just watching it with her, but I sit down on my couch instead and use my imagination. Towards the end, I yell out, "Don't open the effing case," because the guy is making a huge probability mistake on the show, if my math and hearing are serving me correct, though, to be fair, my math is circumspect at best. My neighbor's dog starts barking, and I think of poor old Bernice only nine years old, and that old mutt of hers dead as a door nail that day.

"I'd have backed over him too," I told her, and perhaps that wasn't the best way to start the conversation. Bernice was not kind, and neither was I. We were good company for each other because neither one of us expected much from one another. It was like marriage without all the fanfare. "You're a terrible person," she says, and I agree. "One of the worst."

I tell her that in the morning we'll go down to the pound and pick out a dog. We'll take him to the park and play fetch, rub his belly, say to strangers, "Don't worry, he's good with children" even if we don't know a damn thing about him. We'll make out of our lives what we've already lost. "Can he be a retriever?" she asks, and I tell her yes because I'm feeling magnanimous. "What will we do with him at the end of the day?" she asks. "Neither one of us can take him?" And it's that sort of question that people have been asking me all of my life? Sure, sure, we like your dream old boy, but how are you going to put it all together? "I don't know," I tell her, and hang up the phone in an instant, and walk out into the rain, barefoot, and thread my toes through the rivulets on the back porch. This is what I'll be doing tonight.