Dale Hutchins

You are standing at a register in New York, in the body of a boy named Isaiah, and the line is eleven deep. He has been yours for less than a minute. The red hair itches at your neck. The beard is a thing you keep touching, and you cannot say what it is you want from it. There is a coin tray under your fingers, quarters gone warm. Something in you is already turned toward the door, toward the other room, toward the page with the wheel on it. He was never wrong, this one. He simply is not enough. You want to be somewhere the light is different. You press the drawer shut with your hip, say "one second" to nobody, and spin.

Then the phone is against your ear and a woman is saying a number, and your mouth is already moving around a piece of gum. Spearmint, gone to rubber. The window is a wall of white sky and a parking lot shimmering with heat. You are standing, one hand holding a brown leather planner against your hip, a pen pinned under your thumb, and your voice, his voice, is saying "Yes ma'am, I have that right here." You do not have it. You look down at the desk and the papers say nothing to you.

The sweater is wool, too heavy for this city, and it is the first thing that gives. Your arm moves and the cuff scratches the inside of your wrist. This morning, in a dark bedroom, he pulled it over his head because the office freezes you out, the air handler above the desk blasting all day. A woman's voice in the hall, a kid's cereal bowl clattering. He buttoned the striped collar under it with thick fingers, two tries, and felt a small pride that it still fit. Then the corduroys, the belt notched one hole further out than last year. He did not look at that.

The planner is warm from his ribs. Brown leather, soft at the corners. A flash comes: a girl of nine pressing a sticker inside the cover, a crooked cross, and him saying he would never peel it off. He never has. Under your thumb the pen is chewed at the end. Chewing runs in him like breathing; when he quit smoking the gum came in to fill the space, and the jaw never stopped. You feel the old craving still there, a little hollow behind the sternum. It is a nineteen-year-old hollow. A cigarette behind a bowling alley, the crest on his forearm still red and new, the team they all swore to follow forever. And a girl before his wife, laughing at him, dimples deepening his cheeks. You can feel them now, creased into your face without asking. He thinks about her sometimes. Not often. Mostly at red lights.

The ring is cool against your cheek where the phone presses. He proposed in a church parking lot, sweating through his shirt. Thirty years of Sundays since. Three kids, the third one still at the kitchen table doing homework. A drink or two at night on the back step, the ice settling. A savings account he checks the way other men pray, quietly, to be reassured. Your knees ache from standing. The belly pulls at the belt. The shoulders are strong, though, thick from years of hauling boxes of files for people who never say thank you. His heart is ticking along steady and a little tired.

"Sir? Are you still there?"

You lift your free hand from the planner and turn it over. Wide palm, blunt nails, the ring, ink on the knuckles and the wrist, letters you cannot read yet. Then you look up at the glass, at your reflection over the lot. The dimples are there even though you are not smiling.

"Call me back," you say, and lower the phone. "I'm not who you were talking to."

The gum has gone cold in your mouth. Somewhere a wheel is waiting. You wonder how long before you want it.