Anand Prakash Rao

The first thing I do is take Tyler's hands off the steering wheel of the mower, and I look at them. Eighteen years old, a minute old to me, green to the wrist. I could have stayed. The body was fine. It was the sky that sent me back: so wide and so flat that I could see my own whole day lying ahead of me to the horizon, and nothing in it. I go to the wheel the way you scratch a bite.

Before that, though, there was the other one. Gerald, sixty-five, the chief executive, whose soft stomach I wore for under a minute and whose cufflinks I turned over in his fingers. I know what he says to the man this deputy will never meet. It is not my business now. I pay. I spin.

Then the road is under me, and the light is the long gold light just before it goes. I am standing at the door of a county cruiser with my left hand on the handle. My right hand holds a hat by its brim. The pull of the belt is on my hips, a weight of leather and steel, and the air smells of cut hay and hot asphalt.

I close the door, and it is wrong. I do it too fast and it does not catch. Then I do it again, slowly, and it clicks home. I try the handle. It holds. I try it again, and again, ten times, each one checked, on a job that has not needed checking in years. His thumb knows the motion better than I do.

The shirt comes first. Khaki, pressed stiff, and against my back it is warm, and it gives me his morning. A kitchen in Brooklyn, a window full of wet brick. He is buttoning the cuffs, left and then right, because his mother did it in that order. The shaving comes with it, a slow pass under the cleft of the chin, the one place the blade has to be patient. Then the belt, the heavy brown leather, and each pouch fastened in order like a prayer. In the drawer by the bed there is a small stone, a bit of black tourmaline. He touches it without thinking when he leaves, and he would be embarrassed to say why.

The hat's brim is stiff under my fingers, and it gives me a woman laughing on a stoop in the rain, with his coat over her head. They did not end badly. They ended slowly, and he still keeps her number. My knuckles crack. His habit, not mine, and the small pop is a comfort I did not choose.

The body underneath is strong and tired. The shoulders are heavy, the calves ache from standing, and the jaw is smooth, with the cleft catching the wind. The saved money in him is a quiet number, thin and steady, and I feel how carefully he built it.

I turn my hand over. It is brown, broad, callused at the base of the fingers, and it is not mine. I lift my eyes to the empty road.

"Well," I say, in his low voice. "Hello, Anand."

The light is going. I wonder how long it will take before I want something again.