Calvin Prescott Aldous

You are standing in a kitchen in Houston, in Curtis Rademaker's boots, and the coffee has gone cold in his hand. Thirty-nine years in the shoulders, a landscaper's ache sitting low in the back. Out the window the sprinklers tick over a lawn that isn't yours. You have worn him for less than a minute. You have worn him long enough to find out the one thing: he is a man who cannot be surprised. He knows what the day holds. Mulch, mowers, a client who pays late. You wanted something you had not already read the end of. You set the cup down on the counter. You do not finish it.

You spin.

Cold. That comes first, a dry steel cold on the face, and a hum overhead. Your hands are inside a jet engine. They are already moving, a fitting between thumb and finger, and you do the motion wrong. The turn is a hair off. Some part of the body knows it before you do. You back the fitting out and do it slowly, correctly. Then the next, and the next, ten of them, each one checked, because you are new and the job has not needed checking in years.

Then his things begin to speak.

The coverall first, stiff at the elbows, cotton gone soft with washing. A morning comes up through the sleeves. Dark apartment, a girlfriend's breathing in the next room, his own feet cold on the floor. He pulls the left leg on, then the right, and the zipper rasps up past the chest, over ink he does not look at. A unit insignia, from a time he doesn't discuss. The collar lifts it into view anyway. The feeling is not pride. It is something quieter, a man keeping a promise to people who aren't here.

The pliers in the pocket knock against your ribs. Under them, a flash of a church basement, folding chairs, a paper cup of water poured for himself because he never takes the coffee. Years ago there was a cigarette, and the ghost of it comes into your fingers, a wanting with nowhere to land. He carries that wanting like a coin he refuses to spend.

The ring. His thumb finds it in the left hand without being asked, and it turns, turns, a plain band he rolls when he is not thinking. It is not for the girlfriend asleep in that apartment. It is older. Memory of a woman's laugh in a kitchen that smelled of toast, then the quiet after she left. He is still carrying her, and it is not you carrying it. It is him, in you, a weight you didn't pay for.

The body: six foot one, soft through the middle, thin in the arms, and the knees complain when you lean. The beard drags against the collar. The cowling's cold edge presses your forearm and the old job rises with it, a hundred cold mornings, the one night he caught a cracked line no one else had looked at. He told no one how it felt. It felt like being trusted by the sky.

Under your boots the concrete is cold and gritty with grease. Winter light comes through tall windows, and a train rattles by on the tracks outside.

You take your hand out of the engine and look at it. Fingers black at the creases, steady. You turn it over. Then you lift your eyes.

"Well," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected. "Hello, Calvin."

The train fades. You flex the hand and wonder how long this one will hold, and when the wanting will come back.