Dale Everett Hutchins

You are standing in a kitchen in Las Vegas with the refrigerator open, and the light inside it is the only light. Twenty-seven years old, this body, brown eyes. A teacher's body. Two minutes old to you. You have been reading the spines of his cookbooks and the magnets on his door, and a stack of ungraded essays squares itself on the counter as though it wants to be asked about. You can't do it. You tried: you picked up the red pen and your hand did nothing a hand should know. He knew how to be gentle with a sixteen-year-old's bad paragraph, and you don't. That is most of why. The rest you would not say out loud, even in an empty kitchen, even to him. You close the refrigerator. The dark comes back. The page with the wheel is already open on the phone, and your thumb has been there longer than you admit.

Then you are rained on.

Water on your face, on the open mouth, cold in the lashes. Hood shoved back, hair plastered, the scalp bare to it at the crown. You are standing a step out from under a bus shelter with your head tipped back, and you are not turning out of it. Behind you a sign says 3 MIN in orange. The runoff finds the collar of the jacket and runs down the spine. It is the first cold in a long time. You can tell it's long because he is not complaining. He is standing in it like a man being forgiven.

Your hands are at your sides. The right one is already closing and working, and the knuckles crack, one, two, three, a habit that doesn't ask you.

The jacket is slick nylon, and the cuff against your wrist gives you the first thing: a motel closet in the dark, this jacket pulled off a hanger, and the feeling that he was early for everything because late had cost him once. The boots are heavy and wet through at the toe. Under your feet the concrete is cold, and it brings a gravel yard, afternoon so bright it whites out, saguaros standing black against it, and a ladder's rungs printing hot lines across his palms. Forty-six years of those rungs are in the calves, in the left knee that sulks, in the shoulders that still lift a coil of drop line without being asked. You are five foot six and solid. There is a soft weight at the belt and a stiffness low in the back that says Sunday, says too many poles.

In the pocket your fingers find a cigar, and what comes is a single one, always one, lit on the tailgate after the last drop, a thing he allowed himself instead of the bottle. The bottle comes after it, not as a picture, as a decision: a kitchen, a morning, a pouring-out, and his own voice saying the Lord and I are going to get through this one. He means it. It is not a small thing in him. It sits below the ribs like a second spine.

The zipper pull is cold. His thumb knows it. This morning, in a dark apartment, he did it up to the chin, listening to the rain on the roof and thinking of nothing, and then of a woman. The ex. A phone number he has never deleted. You can't see her face. There is just a laugh at the end of a long drive and the ache of having been left decently. He was not going to call. He was just going to stand out in the rain a minute and let the number be there.

Down the street, headlights smear in the wet. The sign, if it changes, you don't see it.

You turn the right hand over. Hard, split-nailed, the callus at the base of each finger worn smooth like a tool handle. They are not yours, and you have been in worse. The rain fills the palm and spills.

You lift your eyes and say, to the street, to whoever, in a voice with gravel in it you didn't choose, "All right. Let's see how long you last."

The bus is coming. You don't know if you'll be on it.