Brent Kowalski

I am standing in a stockroom in New Orleans with a clipboard in a hand that is twenty years old, and I have been Aidan for less than a minute. The count is off by eleven cases. Everyone wants him to care. He has red hair, a patchy beard, and an hour of other people's problems coming through the back door. I could do it. It is the doing that has gone flat, the way a drink goes flat when you realize you ordered it only because it was the next thing. Somewhere in him a boy is still surprised at being a manager. I don't share the surprise. I set the clipboard on the pallet, open the page with the wheel on it, pay, and spin.

Rain. It is already on my face.

I have stepped out from under the shelter a beat early. My hood has fallen back and the water is running down my forehead and into my eyes, and I do not turn out of it. The board behind me says 3 MIN. My boots are planted in the runoff. The cold goes through the jacket's shoulders and I am glad of it, in a way that is not mine.

Then the jacket gives me things. The zipper pull under my thumb is a small cold tooth, and with it comes a morning: a trailer on blocks, a kettle ticking, sagebrush pressed against the step, the light hard and blue. He zipped it up to the throat here, in the dark, hearing the wind move the whole trailer. The sweater under it is waffle-knit and scratchy at the neck. It was a Christmas gift from his daughter, who picked it out herself. I feel his pride that she chose a good one, and under the pride, the ex-wife's handwriting on the card.

The pants are stiff with rain. In the right pocket my fingers find a folded paper, soft as cloth. It is a sales chart he printed so he could rehearse at the bus stop. A glass room, a wall of graphs, men looking at their phones while he talks. He is good at it. I feel the dimples go deep when he smiles, though I am not smiling. He sells numbers he does not entirely believe, and on Sundays he prays about that in a pew, honestly, with his knuckles white.

The boots are worn in at the heel, and my left ankle aches from a thing he did to it years ago. His thighs are thick and dense; this body knows how to carry weight and stand still. My scalp is wet and bare and feels every drop. My jaw is smooth, freshly shaved in a mirror at four in the morning. I know the nick he avoided under the lip, and I know his two drinks last night, the second one poured out of loneliness.

The bus is not here yet. For a moment I think I will keep this one longer than the others, and I don't trust the thought.

I lift my right hand out of the rain and turn it over. The calluses are not mine. The palm fills with water.

I look up, into whatever is looking back, and say, "Cold. Good."

Then the question I always carry is there, quiet: how long.