Chad Boudreaux

Tom Brennick's knuckles are sore, and you are leaving them. The left thumb has been wrong since the Tuesday a chisel skipped, and for forty seconds this morning you have been standing in his shop on Folsom with the planer ticking down and the fog not yet burned off the street, thinking about a thing you will not say out loud: the sawdust got in your mouth and tasted like nothing. All of it tasted like nothing, the coffee, the cedar, the gray beard you rubbed in the mirror. You have worn him for less than a minute and you are already tired of how he is put together. So the phone is in the silver-bearded hand, and the wheel is turning, and the last thing you feel of him is his good shoulders letting go.

Then the floor is concrete and the air is wet and warm and smells of cardboard and diesel. A forklift is beeping somewhere you can't see. Your left hand is on a box, flat, and your right is already moving, and the motion goes wrong: a half second, a fumble, the box skating. You do it again slowly. You do it correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, because you do not know him and your hands do.

The vest comes first, scratchy at the neck, a bit damp where it lies on his shoulders. Something opens: a locker, a hook, a Monday morning, the vest pulled from the hook by one strap. Then the polo, soft from a thousand washes, snug across a belly he has stopped apologizing for. His hands buttoned it in a kitchen with a window unit rattling, a shotgun house, one room behind another, steam coming off the street outside. He stood at the sink and drank water, not coffee, and ran a palm back over his hair, slicking it, long on top. The scalp under your palm now is warm. The gesture is his, and your hand does it before you ask.

The ring on his finger is not a wedding ring. It's a plain band he bought himself, and the memory is a church parking lot, folding chairs, a Wednesday night and a man he knew handing him a coin, the first of many. He was thirty then. Nobody has seen him drink since. He prays in the truck before shift, short, no one's business. The wristwatch is steel and heavy and ticking against the bone, and it gives you a savings account, a number he checks like a pulse, an almost-down-payment on something small with a porch.

The scanner strapped to his forearm buzzes. Under your boots the floor remembers eight years of this aisle, the arch of his foot aching on the left, his lower back a low hum. The pick path is already in your legs.

You lift your right hand and turn it over. Callus at the base of each finger, rough as a rope. Not Tom's. Not anyone's you've worn.

You look up, past the racking, to the bright rectangle of the open dock and the haze lifting off the wet street.

"Morning, Chad," you say, to nobody, to the sun, in a voice that is easy and slow. It is not morning here.

You wonder how long this one holds. The scanner buzzes again, patient, and you do not yet know.