Arthur Petracca

You are standing in Houston with a gun on your belt, and it has been a minute. A minute in Ernesto Villarreal, and already you know what is wrong with him. His knees are fine and his badge is heavy, but when the dispatcher's voice came through the shoulder radio you felt nothing in him answer. He has a sergeant's patience and a thirty-eight-year-old's ache between the shoulders, and none of it is yours to want. You sat in the cruiser with the engine off and the heat coming up through the floor, and you opened the page with the wheel on it. Your thumb knew the way. Fourteen times now. Somewhere in the back of the lot a man was shouting into a phone, and you thought about Gerald's brother, because you have been Gerald, thirty-five days ago, for less than a minute, and you remember what was on the kitchen table in that house. A letter, unopened, with a San Francisco return address. You have wondered since who writes to a man like that. You press the wheel. It turns.

Cold white light, and the weight of a car above you. You are standing with both arms raised, and a socket is seated on a bolt you cannot see. Your breath is slow and wide. The floor is cold concrete through the boot soles. Your arms are tired the way a body gets when it has done the same lift all morning.

The wrench slips a quarter turn. You catch it. Then you do it again, slowly, correctly, and your hands do not need you to.

The shirt comes first. Cotton twill, stiff at the cuffs, the name patch rasping against your ribs. He buttoned it this morning in the dark with the bedroom door shut so as not to wake her, the girlfriend, and he stood a moment at the dresser with the shirt half on because there is a photograph there, two kids at a beach, squinting. A boy and a girl, grown now, and they do not call enough. The feeling that comes with it is not sorrow, exactly. It is a man's careful pride, kept like a tool in a drawer.

The rag in the back pocket is soft as skin. Touch it and you get a woman laughing in a kitchen years ago, flour on her wrist, and the word *Evelyn*, and then a door closing, and then his own voice saying something he cannot take back. She is the one who got away. The letters on his forearm are hers, with the date. He did not put them there to remember. He put them there so he could not pretend.

The wrench is warm from his grip. Through it comes the garage at six on a winter morning, his own father's steel toolbox, a Sunday sermon in the car on the way to a job, the way he prays quietly over a torque spec without ever telling anyone. And Gerald: a boy of twelve on a stoop with a guitar too big for him, and Arthur beside him, ten and furious that the music was loved more than he was. You know Gerald's house. You know the unopened letter. It was his. It was an apology, and Arthur wrote it three times before he sent it.

Your back aches at the belt line, an honest ache. Your belly sits soft over a thin frame. Your scalp is cool where the draft finds it, and your jaw is smooth from this morning's razor. The freckles you cannot feel, but you feel him knowing they are there, the way his mother used to press a thumb on his nose.

You lower your hands. They are square, scarred across the knuckles, the nails black at the edges. You turn one over. The lettering runs up the inside of the forearm, steady. You lift your eyes to the bright mouth of the driveway, to the white bay window at the top of the hill.

"Hello, Arthur," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected, and kind. Under it the wheel is already turning, somewhere. You do not know how long this lasts.