Dustin Kessler

The man I am leaving has a tremor in his left hand that started this morning, and I could not have said why that was the thing. Patrick Gallagher, fifty-six, sits in a plastic chair at the back of the church basement on a Friday afternoon with a styrofoam cup going cold. In forty minutes a boy will sit across from him and say he is clean. Patrick would know, from the way the boy holds his sleeves, that he isn't. Patrick has known this kind of thing for twenty years, and I have had him for two minutes and already he knows it through me, and I cannot stand being the one who knows.

He is good at his work. That is the trouble. Everything he does is for people who are trying to stay in themselves, and I am not trying to. I get my phone out. My thumb is already on the page with the wheel.

I pay. It turns.

Then the light is white and flat, and there is glass in front of me with a desert behind it, and my right arm is up, reaching. Cardboard under my fingers. A box edge, a little crushed at the corner. In my left hand something heavy and plastic with a trigger, a price gun. I have been straightening, and I was somewhere else a moment ago, and the hand was wrong. I do it again, slowly. Square the box. Push it flush. The next one. The next. Each one I check, and my hand does not know why I am checking.

The vest is thin mesh, and it clings at the back where the air-conditioning gives out near the window. My shirt is damp between the shoulder blades. The first memory comes up through that, his and not mine. A bedroom, early. He pulls the black tee over his head and it catches on the pompadour, and he swears softly and fixes it in the mirror with two fingers, a little wax, up and back, the one vanity he has. A small girl's voice from the hall asks if he's going. He says he is. He buttons nothing, the vest has no buttons, only the zip he never uses. He feels a clean, aching tenderness for the voice in the hall, and under it the old shame of not being enough for her.

My thumb finds the price gun's trigger ridge and the roll of labels, and I get another: a woman at a kitchen counter, a recent one, her keys going down on the tile. *I can't keep doing the math with you,* she says. His chest goes tight and hollow. He had said nothing. He had gone and stocked shelves the next day at the same speed as always.

Something at the corner of my mouth. A toothpick, flat and splintered, soft from chewing. The taste is cinnamon. My teeth work it without asking. It carries a whole summer: his father's truck, the cracked dash, a toothpick in the old man's mouth, and him at nine copying it, proud.

Under my shoes, the floor is concrete under thin tile, and my feet ache in cheap soles from five hours of standing. My knees are twenty-eight and forgiving. My shoulders are strong from lifting cartons. Against my collarbone, the faint cool of ink, geometric, fine lines. A needle, a Tuesday, a friend laughing, a decision made for no one. Beyond the glass a turquoise house, chain-link, dust, the whole street blown clean by sun. His, somehow. He knows its weather.

I lift my right hand off the box and turn it over. The knuckles are not mine. The nails are clipped square. A faint line of cardboard dust across the palm. I close it and open it.

I look up into the glass and a man with a tall blond wave of hair looks back, a beard close to his jaw, mouth around a toothpick.

"Okay," I say, in his voice, low and a little hoarse. "Okay. You're mine."

The toothpick turns once on my tongue. Somewhere the wheel is still spinning in me, the wanting asleep but not gone, and I do not know whether I will be here for supper, or for the next box.