Dale Hutchins

You are standing in a Houston kitchen at the end of a long day, in Russell Kowalczyk's body, and the body is fine. It has good knees. It has a back that hauls block all day and doesn't complain. The gray in its hair is a thing you caught in the bathroom mirror and liked. You have worn him for less than a minute and already there is nothing to fix.

That is the trouble. His phone is face-down on the counter, and you know without turning it over that it holds a woman's name, a standing invitation, a Thursday you could step into. He could do all of it. You don't want any of it. Under his ribs the wanting has come back, thin and cold, the way it always does, and you open the page with his thumb. The wheel is already turning.

It stops.

You are sitting. The bench is hard against the backs of your thighs, and a tube light buzzes overhead. Your forearms rest on your knees, and the bones of them press into the meat of your legs. A water bottle sweats on the concrete by your boot. Your breath is going out through your teeth, a long hiss, and then it isn't. You stop it a minute early, and that is the first thing his body ever does for you.

Your right leg is bouncing. It has been all along, a small hard tick of heel on floor, and you let it, because it isn't yours to stop yet.

Then the flannel. You shift, and the collar drags at your neck, and a morning opens in his hands. He is in a dark kitchen and the coffee maker is gurgling. He buttons the flannel from the bottom up, the way he always has, because his mother did it that way. His wife is asleep upstairs and he is careful with the stairs. The third one cracks. He steps over it without looking. The khakis come after, with the belt already through the loops, and the memory has a feeling in it, a plain quiet he'd have called nothing: *one more day of the route*.

You press your palms flat on your knees and the ring shows up against the denim. A gold band, worn thin on the underside. It brings a different afternoon, bigger. A hospital hallway, a vending machine, his hand shaking around a paper cup. A third child, the last one, loud as a kettle. He cried in the stairwell where nobody could see and then went back in with his face fixed. You feel the pride of it, and under the pride, the money, which was never enough. Nothing to his name. A van that belongs to the company, a house that belongs to the bank, a wife who stayed anyway. He has never said out loud how much that weighs.

The boots. You press your toes down and the leather creaks, and you are in the open back of the van in sleet with a handheld scanner beeping at a porch where nobody answers. Fifty-seven years old, carrying a box that weighs more than it says. The shoulder remembers it. So does the hip, a dull coin of ache you hadn't noticed until now. There is a dead diner on the main street, a stoplight that blinks to no one, and he drives past both every morning and has stopped seeing them. He quit drinking years ago. He doesn't think about it anymore except on Fridays.

Your hands drop to the bar overhead, rough steel, knurling biting your palms. They go two inches wider than he has gripped all year, and you feel his body object, a small stubborn protest in the shoulders, and then give way.

You lift. The reps come slow, and your face does nothing, none of the grimace he would have made. Inside, the muscles burn clean and ordinary, and you think how strange it is to be handed a man's whole strength and not his reasons for using it.

You let the bar settle. You lift your right hand from the steel and turn it over under the buzzing light. The palm is creased, the knuckles thick, the pale line of the ring pressed into the finger. It isn't yours. It is the newest thing you own.

You look up and say it to the empty room, in a voice a size too deep.

"Okay, Dale. Let's see what you've got."

Your leg is still bouncing. You don't know how long it will keep doing it for you.