Dennis Halloran

You are standing at a bathroom sink in Ohio, in a body that is less than a minute old, looking at the gap between Kevin Tsai's front teeth. The gap isn't the trouble. The trouble is that he has a mortgage, a dispatcher's voice in his phone, and a truck waiting in the dark, and you were a man for ninety seconds before you understood that all of it needs doing, every morning, by whoever is in him. You wanted a body. You didn't know you were also signing for a Tuesday. So you set the toothbrush down, wet and still foaming, and open the page with the wheel on it. The wheel turns. His thumbs are very steady. Then the sink is gone.

Cold. Cold first, then weight: a box against your forearms, cardboard corner biting the heel of your palm through a glove. Your leg is bouncing. It has been bouncing the whole time, and now you feel it, a small engine under the knee. Your breath goes out white under a hard light. Someone has just done a motion wrong, and it was you, or him, half a second ago, the box tipping where it should have slid. You pull it back and set it down slowly and correctly. Then the next box. Then the next, each one checked, and nothing needs checking.

The vest first: stiff reflective strips, cold nylon, and with it a morning. His hands, not yours, working the zipper of the hood in a dark kitchen. A wife's back at the stove, her robe the color of weak tea. She says, take the good gloves, and he doesn't, and she knows he won't. He thinks: thirty-one years of her saying it. The feeling is warm and a little ashamed, like being loved by someone who keeps better track of him than he does.

The glove, then. Wool-lined, the palm gone slick and thin. Under it the wedding band presses a groove into the finger. A different flash: a hospital corridor, two times, years apart, and both times he is holding something small in his arms and thinking, I have nothing, I have nothing to give this one, and then the thought turning over into I'll give all of it. A boy and a girl, grown now, one who calls and one who doesn't. The one who doesn't is the ache he carries under the ribs, next to the bad shoulder.

The cardboard smells of dust and tape. Under that, faintly, his own sleeve: pipe tobacco, cherry and char. The evening ritual comes up whole: the porch, the first drink, the second, the bowl packed with a thumb that knows exactly how much. A snowmobile under a blue tarp he keeps meaning to fix. An ex-wife's laugh across a table, twenty-five years ago, and a flat sorrow that it still moves him. Nothing in the bank. Nobody's fool about that either.

Your back is a hard, wide, tired thing. Knees grinding. The belly rides low and warm under the vest, a muscled heaviness that has carried a thousand trailers. Under your sleeve, the half sleeve of a face in black and gray is warm against the cold, and a memory leans in from it, a face you'd know and cannot name yet, someone he lost. You decline it. It's his.

You lift your right hand from the box and turn it over. Thick fingers, scarred knuckle, the portrait inked up the forearm looking at you from the inside of his skin. You lift your eyes. Your dimples are deep; you can feel them settle even though you aren't smiling.

"Well," you say, in a voice gravel-low, a stranger's, yours. "Hello, Dennis."

The leg keeps bouncing. Somewhere a wheel is still turning, and you wonder how long before it calls.