Eric Sorensen

You are Walter Coombs, and you have been Walter Coombs for less than a minute, and already you are standing at the window of a bus depot office with his coffee going cold in his big freckled hand, looking at a gray Maine sky and wanting out. Nothing is wrong with him. The beard itches the way a beard should. His knees are fine. The keys on his belt are heavy with a hundred small routes. But a keyring brought up a Tuesday of his, a woman waving from a porch, and you felt how much he loved it, all of it, and the loving sat in you like a stranger's coat. That is the trouble. You carry what you were given, and you would rather be somebody whose life you can't feel the edges of. The wheel is already open in your mind. You pay. You spin.

Light the color of bleached paper. You are standing, already standing, on a concrete landing above a tiled courtyard, and a briefcase hangs from your right hand with its strap-weight dragging the shoulder down. The air is wet and salted. Somewhere behind the pastel balconies the ocean breathes. You are halfway through a motion you didn't start, a shifting of the case, a turn of the wrist, and the rhythm of it breaks in you, wrong, and you do it again slowly, correctly, and then ten more times, each checked, as if the body doubted a thing it has done ten thousand times.

Then the wool. The jacket's shoulders sit square on you, and the cuff brushes the steel watch. Something comes up through the leather handle, warm and cracked under your fingers: a father's office, a secondhand case given across a desk, *you'll want something that looks like you've been somewhere.* Eric's pride, small and embarrassed. Your jaw is tight. It clenches without being asked, molars set, and the memory under it arrives: a judge who talked over him, years ago, and his silence afterward in a hallway, the jaw doing all his shouting.

The tie. Your free hand finds the knot and it is a morning. A bedroom with the blinds half down. His wife in the doorway watching him fail the dimple twice, then crossing the floor to fix it, thumbs under his collar, saying nothing, smelling of lemon soap. He stood still for her. He always stands still for her. The white shirt against your back is crisp at the shoulders and damp between the blades, sleeves buttoned one, two, the watch last, always last.

The ring. You turn it with your thumb and feel the groove it has worn into the finger. Brandon's number sits in a phone in his pocket, you know it before you touch it: the older brother in Houston, the beard, the call center, the Christmas silence over money. You wore Brandon. You know the house that brother returns to, the kitchen smell, the shame he hides with jokes. Eric never knew how nearly alike they sounded on the phone. You carry both of them now, and neither knows.

Under your soles the tile is slick, the shoes narrow, a left heel worn slightly outward. Your scalp is cool where the hair is gone, the horseshoe of silver at the sides prickling in the humid air. Forty-two. A dull ache sits low in the back from a thousand chairs. Your lungs are good. Your stomach is empty and a little sour. A quarter of the savings he's built is still in his head as a number, and a hallway, and a fear.

You lift your free hand and look at it. Clean nails, a pale band on the finger, a pulse in the wrist. You turn it over. Then you look up.

"Well, counselor," you say, and the voice is dry and unfamiliar in your mouth. "Let's see how long you last."