Sunday, Six Containers

"Explain to me," Jess said, "why I'm eating Tuesday's lunch on Sunday night." Marcus didn't look up from the cutting board. There were six glass containers lined up on the counter like a small, hopeful army. In each one: a scoop of brown rice, a fist of roasted broccoli, and a portion of chicken breast that he had weighed. Weighed. On a scale he'd bought online. "You're not eating Tuesday's lunch. You're eating a test portion." "It's the same as the other five." "It's a control." She ate it standing at the counter. It was fine. It was food in the way that a hotel room is a room. Outside, Winnipeg was doing its late-January thing where the windows frosted from the inside. Marcus had started this after the physical. Nothing dramatic. His doctor had said "trending" about his blood pressure and shown him a graph, and Marcus, who ran spreadsheets for a living, had taken one look at a line going the wrong way and gone straight to war. "You know," Jess said, "people manage to be healthy without turning the kitchen into a lab." "Name one." "Your mother." "My mother eats perogies four nights a week and is powered by spite." "And she's eighty-one." He conceded the point with a small tilt of the knife. The thing was, it worked. She could see that. Three weeks in and he wasn't buying a muffin at the gas station on the way to work anymore because there was a container in his bag. He wasn't eating cereal at 10pm because dinner had been an afterthought. He'd lost a bit around the face and his sleep tracker, another purchase, said he was getting more deep sleep, whatever that meant. What she missed was cooking. Actual cooking, the Tuesday-night improv kind where you open the fridge and see what's dying and make something out of it. Marcus's system had no room for dying vegetables. Everything had a plan. "Can I propose a treaty?" she said. "Go." "Monday to Thursday, your army." She gestured at the containers. "Friday to Sunday, we cook. Together. No scale. If I want to put butter in something, butter goes in."

He thought about it. He actually thought about it, which she loved about him and also found unbearable. "Friday to Sunday is three days." "Yes." "That's forty-three percent of the week." "Marcus." "Fine. But Saturday breakfast I still do the eggs." "Deal." He snapped the lids on the containers and stacked them in the fridge, three high, two wide. Then he turned around and she was holding out a fork with a piece of his weighed chicken on it. "It's a bit dry," she said. "Just so you know. For the control." He took the fork. He chewed. He made a face. "Noted," he said, and got out a pen.