Anthony Rinaldi

You are Samir Haddad for the length of one breath, and the breath is wrong. It is too deep. His chest is built for it, the contractor's chest, the good lungs. His knees take the floor of the Boston job site without complaint. He is 37 and athletic and nothing hurts, and that is the trouble. You stand in the sunlit shell of someone's kitchen with a level in your hand, and the hand is steady, and you have nothing to want.

Raymond Choi's name is still in your mouth from two bodies ago. You were him for under a minute, long enough to learn where he kept the key to the house in Queens, and what you found there. You did not take it. You stood in his hallway and understood that the man across the river would be fine, and that he had never once been fine in your reading of it. You keep thinking of the other man, the one Raymond hated. You never met him. You have only the hatred, and it is a thread you cannot stop pulling. Nothing is wrong with Samir. That is why you leave him.

You set the level down on the sawhorse. You pay. You spin.

Fluorescent light, a hum, and the belt moving under your wrist. A bag of bread comes down the black rubber toward you. Your right hand has the scanner and your left is reaching, and your head is turned toward the doors, toward something you were listening for. The motion goes wrong. The scanner swings at the bread and misses, and your hand knows it before you do. You do it again, slowly. Beep. Then ten more, each checked, each one on a job that has not needed checking in years.

The weight is the first thing. Dad bod, a belly that rides over the belt and rests against the counter edge when you lean. Your feet ache in the old brown boots, the dull ache of a thousand hours on one square of floor. You are five-eight and the counter is exactly at your hip, as if it was set for you.

The lanyard is cool against your sternum. You touch the card, and a flash comes up that is not yours. A bathroom mirror, steam, a razor he skipped again. He rubs the stubble and thinks Friday, I'll do it Friday. A child's voice through the wall is shouting about a missing shoe. Three children, four, a pile of small shoes by a door. A woman's laugh from the kitchen, his girlfriend's, tired and kind. The feeling in it is something like being held up from underneath.

The blue jacket is stiff at the elbows. You pull at the cuff and he is there pulling it on in the dark hall, the morning, the left arm first because the right shoulder complains. Paint on the pocket from a weekend he spent fixing a neighbor's railing for nothing. He is not rich. Under five thousand dollars to his name, and he knows the number to the dollar. It sits in him like a stone he carries gently. He prays when he can, a quick folded minute in the back room, and the feeling of that is quieter than anything else in him.

You touch the scanner's cord and it gives you the marble steps. White, worn hollow in the middle by a century of feet. First sun coming down the block onto the rowhouse door. He stands there with coffee going cold and watches the light reach his street before it reaches anyone else's, and he loves that, wordlessly, completely. Then an old ex, a woman in a different kitchen years back, an ache that has no anger left in it. It is only the shape of a door he did not go through.

His chin. You feel it when you swallow, the deep cleft, and a child's finger pressing into it, laughing. Daddy's dent.

The customer is waiting. A woman in gray, patient, her bag open on her arm. The belt hums. Outside the glass doors the street is bright, with steps like his own.

You lift your right hand off the scanner and turn it over. Thick fingers, calluses along the palm from the bagging and the lifting. It is warm, a hand that has been needed all day.

You look up. "Sorry," you say, in a voice that is lower and slower than you expected. "I lost my place for a second."

Then the question, the one that always comes up under the new skin: how long does this one hold, and when does the wanting find you again, and are you still him tomorrow?