Brett Sowinski

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The photograph is heavier than it looks, or maybe that's just his arms, unused to holding anything so carefully. He's been standing on the apron outside Station 4 for almost a minute, squinting up at a stoplight that's been yellow-stuck since before he was born, and the man in the frame is squinting too, in a stiff collar, in a decade that ate itself.

You have wanted to be here since you first saw him at the Fourth of July parade, riding the back step of the engine, waving with the arm that wasn't holding on. You have wanted this so long the wanting stopped feeling like wanting and started feeling like weather, a thing you lived under.

The ancestor is the door. You are what comes through it.

He lowers the photograph.

In the firehouse's dark window behind him, something in his shoulders changes before he notices it himself — spine finding a straightness it didn't have, hands finding each other and folding low at his waist, patient as a churchyard. For one second he is standing the way a man stood in 1924, waiting for a photographer to finish fussing with the light.

Then it's just you, wearing him.

You test the eye first, without meaning to — the one that drifts. You feel it slide, lazy, toward the diner's dead neon sign, and you understand it the way you understand your own tongue: not a flaw, just a direction his body likes to look when no one's asking it to look anywhere in particular.

"You good, Brett?" Someone's voice, from inside the bay. Wozniak, older, gut like a proof-of-life. "You went somewhere."

"Yeah." Your — his — voice comes out rough, unpracticed, like a key turning in a lock that's been painted shut. "Just thinking about my grandpa."

You have a week. You knew that going in, the way you know the sky is up. You didn't know it would feel like a week has a shape, a hunger of its own, counting down whether you look at it or not.

*

There is a girlfriend. Her name is Dana and she works at the pharmacy two towns over and she calls that evening, and you answer because his hand answers before you can stop it, muscle remembering a rhythm you never learned.

"You're being weird," she says, not unkindly, the fourth sentence in.

"I held Grandpa Aldous's picture today," you say, and it's true, it's his memory surfacing through you like a fish coming up for air, a name you didn't know until his mouth made it. "Looked just like me. Same eye and everything."

"That's the one who died in the fire, right? The station fire, the old one?"

You didn't know that. You feel it land somewhere that isn't quite your chest, because it isn't quite your body, but it's the only chest you've got this week, so you feel it there anyway.

"Yeah," you say. "That one."

She talks about her sister's baby shower, about paint samples, about nothing, and you listen with an attention she's probably not used to, because you would listen to this ordinary, unremarkable, beautiful life forever if forever were on the table. It isn't. You already know exactly how not-on-the-table it is.

*

The days go the way days go in a town with one stoplight. Calls come in small — a chimney fire, a car in a ditch off Route 9, a controlled burn on the Hendricks property that gets briefly uncontrolled and then controlled again. You haul hose you've never touched with muscles that ache in ways you didn't design. You eat cereal standing at a counter with four other men who call him Sow and Sowinski and once, affectionately, Wall-Eye, and you laugh along because he would have laughed along, you can feel the shape of the laugh waiting in his throat like a held note.

At night you lie in his bed in his apartment above the hardware store and you let his drifting eye wander the ceiling, and you think: this is the closest I will ever be to him, wearing his hands, wearing his tired, and I am spending it on chimney fires and cereal.

So on the fifth day you do the only reckless thing available to a stolen week. You drive to the pharmacy on your day off and you tell Dana you want to take her to the diner, the closed one, the one with the dead sign, because you read once that his grandfather proposed to his grandmother on that same stretch of sidewalk before the diner was even built, back when it was just a corner and a promise.

"How do you know that?" she asks, delighted, suspicious in the pleasant way people get when someone surprises them.

"Family stuff," you say. "Comes back to you sometimes."

You stand her under the dead stoplight in the last violet light of a small-town evening and you take his hand — your hand, this week — and you tell her she's good for him, good for whoever he is when nobody's steering, and she laughs and says *you're being so weird lately, Brett,* and kisses him like she has a hundred times before and will, you hope, a hundred times after.

*

On the last night you take the photograph out again, from the drawer where he — where you — put it back. Aldous Sowinski, stiff collar, a hundred years of patience folded into his hands. You hold it the way he held it, and in the window's dark glass you watch the posture arrive again on its own, unbidden, straight-backed, waiting.

You think: I got a week with him and spent most of it being careful.

You think: maybe careful is the only kind of love that fits inside someone else's life without breaking it.

The eye drifts toward the window, toward the dead light, toward the diner that will stay closed long after you're gone. You let it. It was always going that way, with or without you steering.

Then you let go of the wheel, and somewhere far off, something that isn't quite a hand stops holding on.