All the chemicals in Home Depot would not resurrect Ron’s sun-scorched grass. What it needed was rain; there had been none for weeks, and none was expected. So Ron was there for a sprinkler, which almost certainly would flop over on its side and saturate the grass around it, leaving the rest of the lawn bone dry.

Back at the car, the engine made clicking sounds. “Red on dead,” Ron mumbled as he tried to remember how to connect jumper cables to a car’s dead battery and that of the good car, in this case the Honda Civic of a Home Deport worker named Tommy, who was about his son’s age, late teens. Tommy had the cables but did not know how to use them either. Three attempts. Nothing.

“Hey man, I got to get back to work,” Tommy said as Ron jiggled the cables. This time it worked. By the minor miracle of a completed electrical circuit, his car was running again. He thanked Tommy, and when Tommy muttered “no problem,” Ron thought of his son and how little time they had spent together lately, which he had been blaming on the natural course of adolescence. Instead of driving to a shop, Ron drove home, where he shut down the car and waited for the battery to drain. While he waited, he texted his son: “Got plans tonight? If  not, let’s practice jump-starting a car.”

Unexpectedly, it began to rain.  Hopefully, Ron waited for a return text.