Curtis Wendell Haddix

You are standing in a Philadelphia garden shed that is not yours, in Eamon Hanratty's boots, and the gold tooth keeps finding the cold air. You have been him for less than a minute. He was thirty-one and skinny-fat and his knees were already complaining about the gravel. You never even picked up the rake. The thing that sent you back was small and you will not say it aloud: the beard itched, and in the dark window of the shed you looked like a man who was waiting for someone to come get him. Nobody was coming. So you thumb the site open, the wheel turns, and Eamon goes out of you like a held breath.

The hold music loops back to its first bar. Your shoulder drops the phone into your hand mid-loop. The pen stops on the second digit of a number and stays there.

The kitchen is gray with first light through the window over the sink. The first thing is height: the counter sits low against your hip, and the ceiling is nearer than it should be. Your leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. The heel of one boot taps the linoleum, fast and steady, like it is keeping time with the music.

Then the hold music, thin and bright, a saxophone in a tin can. You hold the phone and the plastic is warm from his ear and his shoulder.

The shirt comes first. Flannel, soft as a rag, the cuffs rolled twice. The cloth against your back gives you a morning: his arms going into the sleeves in the dark bedroom, careful not to wake her, her breathing steady in the bed. The undershirt first, gray from a hundred washes, then the flannel off the chair, the buttons done from the bottom up, because that is how his mother did his. He rolled the cuffs standing in the hall. He put on the jeans last, sitting on the bed edge, one leg and then the other, and his lower back said something about it. He has been saying it for ten years.

You touch the envelope and the pen. The paper is rough under your thumb. A flash: a letter, a number that does not add up, and a cold weight in his stomach that is not yours. Forty minutes on hold already, and under the annoyance something smaller and more frightened. Money. He has some put away, not much, and he does not want to touch it. The pen was his daughter's, blue, with a school's name on the side.

The wedding band is tight on your finger. You turn it with your thumb and a whole summer opens up. A creek, a cable footbridge swaying, green shade, the brown water slow underneath. A woman laughing with her hand on the cable and him saying don't, don't, I can't swim for nothing. He was twenty-six. He asked her there, in the middle of the bridge, because he figured she could not run.

Your nose aches, a dull crooked ache across the bridge of it. A fist, a parking lot, a long time ago. It healed wrong and he never fixed it. Your fingers go to the beard, trimmed close, and find the gray at the chin. There is a pack of cigarettes in the flannel pocket, and your body wants one so plainly that your hand starts to rise. There is a vape somewhere too. Under the collar the ink on your chest feels warm. You do not know why he got it, only that he was young and it hurt less than he had expected.

Somewhere in the drawer, a name. Not his wife's. An old girlfriend, a long road, a song on a radio. It arrives as a pang with no face on it, and then it is gone.

The music loops again. Fifty-six years of weight settle into your shoulders, and the big hands, which know this counter, this pen, the steering wheel of a truck waiting outside in the gray.

You set the phone down on the counter. You look at your hands. The right one still holds the pen, the band on the left one is dull gold against dark skin. You turn them over. The palms are cracked and thick, and they are warm.

You look up at the window and the light, and you say, in a voice lower than any you have had, "All right, Curtis. Let's see what you owe."

Then, underneath it, the quiet question you cannot stop: how long this time? The leg keeps bouncing. The music starts over.