Alton Deveraux

Walter Brennick's knees ache before his coffee's even cold. That's the thing nobody warns you about a body like this — fifty-two years of concrete and rebar sitting in the joints like sediment, and you only rented it for a week and it's already telling you no. You're on his porch, in his gray light, in a Thursday morning that smells like wet brick, and the leg won't stop bouncing under the table, his habit not yours, inherited whole with the meat of him. You've had three days of this ache. Three days of a wife who left before you arrived and a daughter who calls and asks him things you don't know how to answer honestly, so you don't call back. It isn't boredom exactly. It's that the body is a tool with a bad grip, and you have found, after seven hundred and seventy of these, that the wanting always comes back sooner when the grip is bad. You open the laptop on the porch table. The wheel is already loaded, already spinning before you've decided anything, the way it always is by the time you admit you've decided.

The screen goes white, then rain.

You are 5'4" and soaked to the skin and your face is turned up into a downpour that is running warm somehow, warm as a shower, though a beat ago — someone else's beat, not yours yet — it must have been merely wet. Your hood is back. Water is in your ears. Your knees don't hurt. Nothing hurts. You are standing in the runoff at the mouth of a bus shelter with your feet in a river that used to be a curb, and behind you a board is counting down a bus that will now come for no one.

The jacket is the first thing. Navy nylon, cold-slick under your palms when your arms come down from where they'd lifted, unbidden, into the rain — and touching it gives you a Tuesday in October, a coat rack by a door, a hand (his hand, broader knuckled than you expected, more freckled) taking this exact jacket down off a hook because the sky outside a rowhouse window had that flat pewter look that means business. Alton. The name arrives with the jacket, the way names do, printed nowhere but felt everywhere, the way a man knows his own name without reading it. Alton Deveraux, sixty-five, and this jacket has been his since a Sears that isn't there anymore.

The green polo under it: his daughter bought him three of these one Father's Day, said Dad you can't keep wearing undershirts on the porch like some old man, and he'd laughed the kind of laugh that meant she's right, I am, and put one on that same afternoon just to make her happy, and kept wearing them for eleven years after because by then it was simply what he wore. The pants — gray twill, elastic gone soft at the waistband — came from a different life, a work life, forty-one years driving a SEPTA bus down Broad Street, and something in the muscle of these legs still knows the pedal, the mirror check, the exact lean of a bus taking the curve at Erie without spilling anyone's coffee. That's his hands' second language, after the leg-bounce: hands that know a wheel that isn't this one, a big flat wheel, worn smooth in two places from thirty years of the same grip.

The ring finger. You feel it before you understand it — a paleness under the wet, a groove gone shallow with time, and the memory that comes isn't sharp like the others, it's long and slow like a tide: Denise, twenty-six years, two kids, a kitchen on Master Street, an argument about money that was never really about money, and then one day the ring in a dish by the sink and not on his hand, and neither of them crying about it anymore by then, just tired, just done, and somehow still sending each other Christmas cards because the kids liked it that way. He is spiritual about this the way he's spiritual about most things — no church, but something that made him believe the marriage had used itself up honestly, like a candle, not like a house fire. He quit smoking the year after the divorce, cold, out of some stubbornness he never fully explained even to himself. He drinks maybe three times a year, weddings mostly, funerals sometimes, and always feels a little like a fraud doing it.

The shelter's glass at your back, cold through the wet jacket. The board flickers 3 MIN into something that no longer matters. His whole retirement is in this posture — the standing and waiting, the having nowhere he has to be and going anyway, a man who worked forty-one years on somebody else's schedule and now, on his own, still shows up early. This morning he'd stood at his own front door with the jacket half on, one arm in, one arm out, listening to the rain start and thinking, with something close to fondness, well, there it is, and gone out into it anyway, hood up, because six decades of Philadelphia weather never once kept him inside.

You bring your hands up out of the runoff, dripping, and turn them over in the gray light — broader than the ones you had this morning, freckled to the wrist, a soft pale groove where a ring isn't anymore.

"There you go," you say to no one, to the empty board, to the rain still coming down warm as a shower on a face that used to belong entirely to somebody else.