Brent Hollis

You are standing in Kenneth Tran's kitchen with the lights off and the refrigerator humming, and the gold tooth is cold against your lip where you have been pressing it. He has been yours for less than a minute. Thirty-six, dad bod, a help desk man with a headset still hanging on a hook by the door. He is fine. He works. Nothing is wrong with him, and that is the part you cannot explain to the dark. Somebody's phone lit up in the other room and went dark again, and the sound of someone else's family sleeping came through the wall like weather, and you thought: I have been in here long enough to know where everything is, and I do not want to know where anything is. You open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then the gold tooth is gone from your mouth, and the cold with it.

Green. Wet air, brown water somewhere close, and your arm is mid-swing. The hammer is in your right hand, the left holding a stud steady against the frame, and the swing is already committed. It lands wrong, a half inch off, and the nail skids. The jolt goes up through the wrist and into a shoulder that is wider than the one you had a second ago. Your breath is deep and slow, a big man's breath, and it smells of coffee and cut pine.

You set the next nail slowly and drive it right. Then the next. You check each one with your thumb, and you do not know why your thumb knows to.

The hammer handle is worn smooth at one spot, and the spot is where your palm settles, and something opens. A kitchen, a baby on a hip, a woman laughing at him because he has sawdust in his hair again. A warm, stupid, enormous happiness, and under it a tiredness he has never once said aloud. Three kids' worth of it, maybe more.

The vest is stiff with dust across your chest. He zipped it this morning in the dark, truck idling, the wife asleep and the house still. He put the left sleeve on first, always the left, and shoved the pushed-forward fringe off his forehead with the back of his wrist. You feel the gesture before you do it.

The ring. A plain band, tight on a knuckle that has swollen in thirty-nine years of cold mornings. Turn it and you get her name, a hand in his at a courthouse, and then, unbidden and sideways, a different woman. A porch in some other summer. Someone he did not keep, and has never once stopped checking for in crowds. He has told nobody. His wife does not know, and he is not unkind.

Your calf itches where the cuff is rolled. The ink there is a name and a date, and you do not need to read it to feel the weight of it, a day he is not going to tell you about. The memory lets go the moment you stop touching it.

His boots are heavy on the plywood. The knees ache, the lower back has an opinion, and the belly sits comfortably over the belt. His arms are strong in a way that has nothing to do with gyms. A tremor lives in the fingers, fine as a wire, and it quiets only when they are holding something.

Through the open framing, a cable footbridge hangs over the creek, planks slick and green in the shade. You want, absurdly, to cross it.

You lift your hands. Thick fingers, white dust in the creases, the band, the faint shake. You turn them over.

"Huh," you say, in a low Kentucky voice that is not yours. "Well. Hello."

The creek goes on. You do not know how long you get to keep this, and the wanting is quiet in him for now, but you can already feel where it sleeps.