Dale Ruthven

Inside Owen Mathers, nineteen, the freckles and the green eyes and the five-foot-seven I have worn for twelve minutes, I am standing at a counter with a phone. His thumb is sweating. He is a good body. He can climb stairs without thinking about it, and his knees say nothing. But a minute ago a girl laughed in the next room, and it was a laugh he had somewhere in him, a laugh that knew his name, and I stood there like a man at a door he has no key to. His life was not handed to me. His mother's number sits in his phone and I don't know what she calls him. That is the whole reason. I do not say it to myself. I open the page and the wheel is already turning.

The shovel comes down.

I am in the trench, and the ground is exactly where it should be, and my body is mid-stroke with its weight already committed. Too late. The blade bites crooked, the handle jars up through both palms into the elbows, and I wrench it straight and do it again slowly. Then again. Each one I check. The air smells of cut clay and diesel and hot dust, and it is a long way up to the sky.

The handle is worn pale where his hands go. I take it and the wood gives me a morning: a kitchen with the light not yet on, a woman's back at the stove, a coffee that tastes of the can. He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls on the navy long-sleeve first, left arm and then right, the cuffs gone soft at the wrist. Over it the orange shirt, stiff with dried sweat from yesterday, and he does not mind. The belt, the buckle's small bite against his belly. He did this thirty years of mornings and I get one.

The ring on my left hand is tight against the knuckle, and the shovel turns it, and I am standing in a church, hot, in a rented suit, a girl in white laughing at him because he has forgotten the words. That one is warm. It belongs to nobody but him. Behind it comes another girl, older, an old girlfriend, a porch and a screen door, and the feeling is not wanting exactly, more the ache of a tooth that stopped hurting years ago and is remembered when you press it.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. Three children, three truck beds, three hospital parking lots, one of them at night with a fever, him driving too fast and praying the Hail Mary under his breath in a tongue worn thin from use. My back aches low and honest, sixty years of lifting. My scalp is hot where the hat sits on thin hair. My jaw is smooth, he shaved this morning. There is money in a coffee can and not much of it. In the right pocket my fingers find a pen and click it, click it, without me, and I let them.

I lift my hands off the shovel. They are big, cracked, ringed, and they tremble a little with the work. Not mine. I turn them over and look up, past the fence and the road to the water tower, and say, "Well. Hello, Dale."

The pen clicks once in my pocket. I wonder how long it will be before I want something else.