Andre Whitfield

You are Neil Brandvold for less than a minute, and already it is wrong. The beard itches. At five foot three, the kitchen counter sits at the wrong height for everything. You stand at his window in the gray before work with his coffee going cold, and you notice the thing you can't forgive: he has nothing left to want. He is a teacher in a clean house, and nothing in him pulls. You don't want to drive to his school. You want the page with the wheel on it. You put the cup down, and the wheel starts to turn.

The canal path comes up under you at mid-stride. Gravel, cold air, your breath showing white. Your left foot is already coming down and it never lands. You stumble for two steps and the stumble dissolves. Then you are running on the other foot, arms lower, head still. The watch on your wrist buzzes a split you have no record of him ever holding.

Mile four. The water beside you is black and flat and holds the wires upside down. Your lungs are working and your calves burn. He is skinny, all tendon, and he runs light. Thirty years of cigarettes would have wrecked him by now, but he has only had a pack a day for a few years, so the cough waits somewhere low in his chest for you to stop.

The jacket zipped to his throat is the first thing that opens. Black, thin, slick at the cuffs. He put it on in the dark, in a kitchen with one light, the left sleeve first because his left arm is the one with the ink and he always covers it first, a habit from the job. Clients look at the tattoo. Some of them ask. He never explains it, because he has no faith to explain. He got it at nineteen for his grandmother, who had enough for both of them. The cross and the praying hands sit on the inside of his forearm, and the watch rides just above them.

The earbuds are in. A voice reads a count of something, and the watch glows against his wrist. Under his shoes the gravel gives and rolls, and with it comes a Tuesday afternoon on an apartment walkway, white sun on the rail, his folder held against his ribs. He is waiting to be buzzed in. A woman's voice on the intercom says *who*, and he says his name and the agency, and the voice says nothing for a long time. He feels it as a slow drop in his stomach. He has done this four hundred times and it still costs him. He knows how to stand there. You learn it from his knees, which lock a little when he waits.

Then his ex-wife, from nowhere, and not kindly. A kitchen, a lease, a sentence she said in a flat voice, and the shame that stayed. It lasts one stride. His chest tightens, and it is his feeling, not yours, so you let it pass through.

Then a girlfriend's laugh, warm and close, and a smell of soap. His mouth goes soft without your asking.

Your stride has evened out. His body knows the path better than you do. His hands are loose fists, his jaw is smooth and cold where he shaved it, and the wind dries the sweat at the back of his neck. His savings are small, a number he checks too often. His rent is due. Ahead of you the sky is going from slate to pale.

You slow, and the gravel crunches under you. You lift your wrist and look at the hand. The knuckles are long and dark, the tattoo is under the cuff, and the watch is lit. You turn it over, palm up, and look up at the water.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, a little breathless. "Okay. You'll do."

You don't know how long that is true. Maybe years. Maybe until the sun clears the poles. Already something small and hungry is stirring under his ribs, asking.