Caleb Sutter

You are leaving Dwight Pruett because of the knee, and because of the tomato plants. Both are his. The knee has told you every morning for a minute and a half of his life that it is sixty years old. The tomatoes you cannot stop staring at: eleven of them in buckets along the fence, his dead wife's idea, and the heat here is already pulling the leaves down at noon. You water them because his hands know to. You do not want to be a man who is needed by tomatoes. So you sit in his kitchen with his big green-eyed reflection in the dark laptop, and you pay, and the wheel turns.

Then the weight is wrong. Less of it, and all of it nearer the ground. You are holding a box against your right hip, and the cardboard edge bites the heel of your hand. Your feet are on bare wood. Cold, clean, empty air, with sun slanting through a bare window, and a key ring swinging against a brass knob behind you, ticking once, twice. You have been a man in Texas for less than a minute, and now you are not.

The sweatshirt is the first thing that gives. Navy, soft at the cuffs, worn thin along the forearms. The cuff catches on your thumb, and suddenly it is this morning: his arms going into those sleeves in the dark of the old apartment, one, then the other, while a child's voice said from the next room that the truck was here. A little girl, hair in one tie. He kneels for her shoes. His chest goes tight with a love so plain it needs no name, and then it is gone.

The box. Your fingers find the tape, and he knows this tape: he ran it across the seams himself last night, three strips, because the bottom of this one is weak. Inside, something shifts with a small ceramic clink, and there it is. A mug. A woman's laugh when he bought it, not the girlfriend's, the other one, the recent one. He packed it anyway. He told himself it was only a mug. Your stomach folds around that and you let it go.

Jeans, stiff at the knee, a wallet worn into the back pocket's shape. His hands will not hold still. The fingers of your left hand drum the box, tap, tap, tap, and then rub the tape, then pick at the corner. They have always done this. In a classroom they click a pen. In a church pew, years ago, they folded and unfolded a bulletin until his mother's hand came down over them. You feel her palm, warm, dry, and the smell of hymnals.

Your back is straight and light. Thirty-two. Nothing aches. After Dwight's knee the absence is almost an insult. Your calves are tight from the stairs, his shoulders pleasantly used up, a clean sting across the palms.

Sneakers, flat canvas, the floor coming up cold through the thin soles. The floor remembers him: he walked it once with a landlord, and he stood here and thought, a bedroom for her, a bedroom for me, this room for the two of us on the nights she is with me. Late classes on the lawn with his laptop, the grass wet through his jeans. He is the oldest in every seminar and he does not mind. Sober for four years: a bottle, a night he will not give you, a decision. The hookah smoke twice a year, sweet, harmless. Less than five thousand dollars in the world, and he has never once been as afraid as he is proud.

You bend and set the box down. It lands soft. You leave the keys hanging in the door.

You hold your hands out in the window light. Square, nicked at the knuckles, a pale line where a watch is not. They are already moving. You turn them over.

Then you look up, at nothing, at the bare beige wall, and you say, in a voice higher and rougher than any you have owned, "Okay. Here we are."

The floor holds. The tomatoes are wilting two states away, and you wonder, with his pulse ticking in your wrists, how long before you want something else.