I’d never really wanted to believe in that — in Men as their own mass entity. I’d always scoffed at the Mars and Venus thing, the reductive, needless divisiveness of it, but now, sitting on my — formerly our — kitchen floor because frying an egg had proven a physical and emotional bridge too far, I considered that I had been cocky. I had been through the kind of wringer where I had thought I was an autonomous individual forging a happy, unencumbered partnership with a fellow, like-minded human being. Our deep friendship, loyalty, eschewal of antiquated boy-girl ritual (such as, say, a marriage formalized within the sanctity of Catholic tradition), placed us high above the fray, I thought, far beyond the clichés of, say, sexual jealousy. Or wandering eyes. Or arguments over dishes. Or the queasy intermingling of wrath and depression represented by a trail of soiled socks and underwear, where each item picked up — followed grimly like a trail of bread crumbs in one of the Grimms’ fairy tales — leads to a kind of emotional oven in which one sits, and stews.

Anyway, years passed. I got over it, kind of, and after a while, Men became just men again. But I have to admit to a shift in my perception. It’s like when you get an eye exam — through one lens, the optometrist shows you a rendering of a small, lonely farmhouse in a distant, empty landscape and, yeah, it looks ok to you. Solid. Distinct. But then a whole new lens gets slotted in and, Oh! How much sharper those lonely, distant, farmhouse lines.

3

He came back on Saturday. The Bestlife workers didn’t work on Saturday, had been my understanding. I was out mowing the lawn and Kelli was sitting on a plastic Muskoka chair, watching me, wearing her Halifax Mooseheads trucker hat to keep off the sun. She hadn’t wanted to come outside at first — once Kelli’s planted on her stool by the window after breakfast, it takes some cajoling to get her out of it before lunch. Like I said, a creature of routine. So much so that even the unexpected sight of her boyfriend coming up the driveway didn’t even provoke the outburst of gleeful, repetitive Trebies I would’ve expected.

“It’s Trebie,” I heard her remark, almost suspiciously, after I turned off the mower.

“How’s my girlfriend?” called Trevor, and Kelli’s suspicion immediately gave way to titters and happy rocking back and forth. It turned out my sister was a pushover. Trevor gave her a fake pinch on the cheek before sauntering over to me with a solemn half smile on his face, like a man holding a gift behind his back. He put his hand on the mower alongside mine.

“Let me do this,” he said.

Suddenly my eye stung from a droplet of sweat mingled with sunscreen that had rolled into it. “I don’t think,” I replied, wincing, “this is in your job description.”

Trevor waited for me to finish dabbing my streaming eye with a shirtsleeve. I wondered if he thought I’d abruptly started crying. If so, he didn’t seem troubled. He struck me as the kind of guy who took a women’s sudden tears in stride, who waited for the storm to pass. I found that sort of admirable. “Can I tell you something?” said Trevor. “I got a buddy who works at Seaside. We had a couple ryes last night.”