Brian Seitz

You leave Dale Hutchins in a parked truck with the dome light on. He has been yours for less than a minute, and already the seat is wrong. The wheel of the truck is too thin for the hands. There is a cooler on the passenger side that you didn't pack and a lanyard you didn't earn. His knee knocks against the dash, and his shaved head is cold. His eyes, blue, keep landing on a dashboard clock that you won't read. Fifty-seven years old and he wants nothing from you. That is the trouble. He sits there like a closed door, and you are somebody who has opened sixty-one of them and has learned how quickly a room goes quiet once you are in it. You thumb the phone. The page is there, with the wheel, and you don't decide anything. Your thumb is simply already moving.

Then rain, and a roof over you, and the smell of wet concrete and a bus shelter's old coffee-and-diesel air.

You are standing. That's the first thing. You are mid-breath, and the breath is heavy, a big man's breath that has to climb past a belly. The hood is up and the edges of it press at your temples. Overhead a red sign reads 3 MIN. Your head is tipped back to it, and your weight is on the left foot, and the right leg is bouncing, bouncing, a heel going on the wet floor like a small engine that has never been switched off.

Then the jacket gives you the first thing. Nylon, cold along the forearms, a zipper pull against your chin. *The closet by the back door, the hook that doesn't hold, so the jacket lives on the dryer.* Her voice in it, not yours: *take the good one, it's coming down.* Brian. She says Brian the way you say a thing you've said ten thousand times and still mean. You feel the warmth of it before you know whose it is.

You lift one hand. The ring is on it, plain, a little tight at the knuckle. When your thumb turns it, the flash comes: a church basement, folding chairs, a paper cup of bad coffee, and a man across from him saying *a day at a time, brother*. Nicotine. Eleven days. The want sits in the back of the throat and in the fingers, a pinch of nothing between two knuckles. That is why the leg bounces. You reach for the pocket and find gum, the hard cinnamon kind, and the taste is a small mercy he has been leaning on all week.

The jeans next, stiff with damp at the hem. *Five-ish in the morning, the light off in the hall, one leg and then the other, sitting on the bed edge so the springs wouldn't wake the girls.* Two of them, down the hall, one with a retainer case on the nightstand. He tiptoed past the doorframe, the way a man does who loves the sleeping. Then the gray zip shirt from the hook, the housekeeping one, in the bag at his feet. He folded it with the sleeves in, a habit from the job. Forty rooms a week, and he strips every bed like he's apologizing to it. His back knows the fitted-sheet corner, the lift and snap. It aches now, low, left side, a dull rope.

Your other hand has drifted to the inside of his forearm and rests on the tattoo through the sleeve. Heat, pressure. A face, black and gray, a man's face. *His father, sixty-one in the hospice, the needle going in on the day after the funeral. He didn't flinch. He wanted to feel it.* Grief comes up through the arm, square and plain, and you stand inside it a moment longer than you would choose.

And there is someone else. A recent ex-girlfriend, from before the ring, a name that surfaces with a smell of her kitchen, and he thinks of her still, once a week, in a church parking lot, and tells no one. It isn't a sin he acts on. It's just a room he keeps unlocked.

The rain has not changed. Down the street a headlight turns, and the sign says 3 MIN and goes on saying it. You step out from under the roof a beat early. The hood goes back by itself, his hand knows how. Rain on the scalp, the cut sides, the freckled cheeks. Cold, honest cold, running into the collar.

You look at his hand, and turn it over. It is wide, and the knuckles are red, the ring wet.

You look up into it and say, "Eleven days. Okay."

Then the question you always carry: how long does this one hold, and when does the wanting come back.