Daniel Haddad

You are Caleb Dunham, twenty-three, and your knees ache from nothing. Two days and twenty-two hours you've worn him. The freckles on his forearms, the dark hair that falls into your eyes, the muscle that came free with him. You stand in his kitchen in small-town Ohio on a Sunday night, the dishwasher ticking, his textbooks open to a chapter you could not make yourself care about. That's the trouble. He is a student, and you are being asked to be one. Tonight a professor's email sat in his phone like a hand on the shoulder, and you felt how thin the whole arrangement was. A body that works, and nothing in it you want. You open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then the engine drops a note and catches.

You are standing in cut grass in the blue end of the evening, both hands on a cold bar, the motor shuddering up through your wrists. One earmuff is pushed off your ear and the world comes in doubled: the roar, and a lawn sprinkler somewhere ticking. Clippings stick wet to your shins. You are a man in the middle of a stripe. You do not stop it. The loose earmuff goes back over your ear, and your hand does it unhurried, as if it has done it ten thousand times.

The bar is rubber, worn smooth where his palms ride. It gives you a morning at once: a rowhouse doorway in Philadelphia, white marble steps worn hollow, first sun coming down the block. His knees on the cool stone, lacing boots. Two small kids' voices behind him, a girl's laugh, and a feeling like a held breath let go, simply gratitude, ordinary as bread.

The shirt against your back is soft from washing. Sleeve by sleeve it dresses you: the left arm first, the cuff turned twice, then the right, drawn down over the lettering he hardly looks at anymore, a name and a date, and a quiet that comes with it, a place he doesn't speak of. He tugs the hem straight. He is forty-one and the shirt knows his shoulders. Grass-stained trousers, the stiff knees of them. Boots with the toes gone soft.

Your back is a forty-one-year-old back, dull at the base, honest. Your lungs are steadier than Caleb's ever were. Under your brow a small pale seam tugs when you squint, and you know without a mirror it is a scar, and you feel an old childhood fall in it, a curb, a shout, a laugh after.

Something in his pocket presses your thigh, a prayer bead bracelet or a key, and with it comes Friday: a low room, shoes lined at the door, forehead to the carpet beside his boys, the stillness of it. No drink in years. He gave it up without ceremony, and the quiet since has been the best thing he owns. A girlfriend's number, her name soft in his head, and his tenderness toward her unhurried, wanting nothing from her he can't give.

The row ahead runs dead straight. Beside it, the crooked ones are yours, or were his, or the last man's. You let go of the bar and the engine dies to a tick.

You turn your hands over. Broad palms, thick calluses, the sleeve's ink running to the wrist. They are not shaking. You look up at the lit window of the house.

"Alright," you say, in a voice with gravel in it. "Let's see how long you last."