Eamon Doyle Hanratty

Four hours ago I was Raymond Cardenas, and I stood in his kitchen in Atlanta with the coffee gone cold in his hand. It was the hour before anything starts. His knee talked every time he shifted. His wife's pill organizer sat on the counter with Tuesday's slot still shut. I want to say it was the knee. It wasn't the knee, or not only. It was that I had been him for less than a minute when the stillness of that kitchen started to feel like a coat that did not close. Fifty-nine years of someone's careful, finished life, and I could not make myself want to lift a single thing in it. I paid. I spun. I did not look at the cup as I set it down.

Then the weight comes in through the handlebar.

Cold steel in both palms, and a push already underway, my arms moving a mower that has been moving a long time. Dew in the air, the first sun coming sideways down a brick block of rowhouses, white marble steps worn hollow in the light. The stripes in the grass are fresh and the stands are empty. I do one thing wrong, a half-step, a hitch in the push. Then I do it again slowly, correctly. I check the next one, and the next ten after, each one examined, on a job that has not needed examining in years.

The handlebar gives me the first of him. Rubber grips gone smooth, and a flash: a spring morning, a different mower, an old man named Gus saying keep your wrists loose, you're not strangling it. A feeling of being chosen for something small. Pride, like a coin held in the mouth.

Then the shirt. Blue, washed soft, damp now between the shoulder blades. His hands remember the buttons, bottom to top, in the dark of a bedroom with a woman asleep and a child's foot sticking out of the blanket in the doorway. The cuffs rolled twice because the left one always slides. Her voice, half under the pillow: *bring home the good bread.* The tenderness of that is his, not mine, and it goes through me like warm water through a cold pipe.

The trousers stiff with old green at the knees. Kneeling at a base path, packing clay with the heel of a hand. A second memory under it, uninvited: a woman on a porch step, years back, laughing with her head turned away. Not the one who sleeps at home. A hollow opens, small and permanent, the shape of someone who got away. He doesn't think about her often. He thinks about her exactly as often as this.

The boots, heavy and wet at the toes. My tongue finds a toothpick I did not know was in my mouth. Splintered, sweet with mint. His hands do that without asking, and I let them. Under the beard, a gold canine presses my lip when I breathe out.

The body underneath: soft in the middle, thin in the arms, a sturdy ache low in the back that is simply what thirty-one feels like on this job. His lungs are good. His legs know the field. On my forearm, the inked portrait of a man's face. I don't have to ask whose. The tattoo is warm and itchy, and a grief with no name comes up through it, a father's, I think, a hand on a shoulder at a ballgame. I let it pass through and out.

I let go of the handlebar with one hand and turn it over in the early light. Sunburned knuckles, dirt in the creases. Two kids' worth of Band-Aid adhesive, faint on the thumb. Not mine. Mine now.

I lift my eyes to the empty stands. "Well," I say, and the gold tooth catches the sun. "Let's see how long you last."

I don't know whether I mean the grass or him or me.