Andre Mosley

You are Caleb Hostetler, and you have been him for less than a minute, and already you are bored of the cold. It is mid-morning in his town, the stockroom door propped with a case of paper towels, and the green eyes you borrowed are reading a delivery manifest without taking in a word. His shoulders are narrow. His five-foot-eight is a short horizon; the shelves are all just above where you want to look. His keys hang on a carabiner against his hip and every one of them opens something that belongs to someone else's quarterly numbers. You were handed a man who can do everything, and what you wanted, you found out, was not to be able to reach. So you set the clipboard on the pallet, you say nothing to the girl restocking the dairy case, and you thumb the page open on the phone in his back pocket. The wheel is already turning before you have decided. Somewhere a man is carrying something heavy through a door.

Now.

The weight is in your left hip first, cardboard corner against the bone, and then the floor arrives, hardwood, old, a little gritty through the soles. Heat sits in the room like a held breath. You are taller. The whole room has dropped away below your eyes and the ceiling is close. There is a smell of dust, of old paint, of someone else's long-gone cooking. A door at your shoulder, and in it the jingle of keys you did not hang there.

You bend your knees and set the box down, and your body knows how: the back takes it, the thighs, a little hitch of breath at the end. You leave the keys where they are. That is also his. Your hand touches the doorframe and goes to the wall instead.

The hoodie is soft, washed thin at the cuffs, and it hands you a morning: his own hands pulling the zipper halfway, the sleeves shoved to the elbow because the truck's air never worked. He stood in a bedroom with one lamp and a mattress on the floor and laughed because she said he looked like a man robbing his own house. Girlfriend. A laugh with a gap of kindness in it. Under that, older and quieter, the other one, the ex, a name you almost catch and do not, and the small clean ache of a thing ended well and still counted.

You walk the edge of the room. Your knuckles trail the plaster, cool and pocked, and the wall tells you things: that he has checked every corner of this place twice, once in daylight with the landlord and once alone with nothing on, that he counted the outlets, that the lease is the first thing with only his name on it. A thousand lanes. The belt running, the scanner's red line, a woman's coupons, the ache of eight hours standing on concrete that lives in the arches of these feet now and in the calves. Scraping by, a number he does the arithmetic on in the dark: rent, the car, what's left. He quit drinking and does not miss it. You feel the pride of that, quiet as a pocket stone.

The jeans are heavy with the heat and the shoes are worn to the shape of his stride. He is twenty-four and his knees say nothing. His chest is broad and easy, his breath deep. You press your fingertips to the beard along the jaw, short, close, and a barber's chair surfaces, a man saying keep it tight, and him saying yes sir.

You stop in the middle of the floor. Sun lies on the boards in long yellow planks. You lift your hands, and they are large and dark and strange, callused at the base of the fingers, a faint crease where a watch strap goes, and you turn them over, and over again.

You look up, at nothing, at the lens of the empty room.

"Nobody's home yet," you say, and it comes out in his low voice, warm as the boards. "Let's see what you left me."

And somewhere under the ribs the wanting is already folded small, patient, waiting to tell you when.