Danny Ruiz Combs

Paul Guidry's knees are done with the floor. Eleven hours of dining room, and now it is nearly midnight on a Sunday, and I am standing in his kitchen with his skinny-fat belly against the counter, eating cold étouffée out of the pot. He has a good life. I could keep it. But the manager's phone keeps buzzing against the granite, somebody wanting him to fix a walk-in cooler, a schedule, a no-show, and the whole body of him is made of being needed by strangers. Three minutes I have worn him, and already I am tired of the sound of his name. I wipe his beard with his wrist. I open the page with the wheel on it.

The wheel spins. I do not feel any travel.

A wet street, and the kerb is not where my foot expects it. I go off it, the car comes up fast, and my palm slaps cold wet metal. I am holding the roof of a parked car. Breath: whiskey, sweet and heavy, and under it a vape's blue-raspberry. My head floats a little above my neck. The scuff in the right foot stops, because I put the foot down flat.

Then the jacket gives me things. The canvas collar rubs my neck, and I get a morning: his hands doing the buttons of the checked shirt, quick, because he is late, the copier at the front office will need warming. A girlfriend's voice from the other room says he smells like last night. He says he doesn't. He does. The cuffs are rolled twice because the sleeves run long, and his thumbs know the roll.

My knuckles crack, both hands, without my asking. Something comes with it: a kitchen, two kids at a table, one of them not looking up, a child's silence that he drank over. Then a church pew, hard under him, a hymn he mouths and does not sing. Then the debt, a number in a drawer that he keeps closed with his hip.

In the jacket pocket is a lighter-shaped vape, warm from his hand. I hold it and get the creek: the cable footbridge, brown water under it, green shade, a woman he used to walk across it with, an old girlfriend, laughing as the planks swung. He misses her in a place below the ribs. My own ribs. The ink on his forearm itches, a name and a date in script. I press my thumb on it and it says nothing to me, only that he chose it once and meant it.

His boots are wet through. His back aches low, forty-five years of it. His legs are stronger than they have a right to be. They carry me forty steps, even and quiet, and I let them, and at the corner they turn left, which is not the way he goes home.

I stop under a streetlight and lift my hands. The tattoos, the cracked knuckles, the nails bitten short. I turn them over.

"Hey," I say, in his low rough voice. "Where are we going?"

I don't know how long he lasts.