Ernesto Villarreal

You are Cody Branham, and the lifeguard's shoulders are the first thing you stop wanting. Twenty-six days and twenty-three hours in him. The chair is high, the sun comes down on the water in plates, and the body knows how to sit still for six hours and be ready for one second. You thought that was what you wanted. This afternoon a kid went under at the shallow end, only a toddler, and you were up and across the concrete before you decided anything. You had him out and coughing before his mother finished screaming. Everyone clapped. You stood dripping in that blond, sun-loved body and felt nothing at all, and you knew you had been feeling nothing for days. You can save a stranger and it is only a motion. So you sit in the Kentucky heat with the phone warm in your hand and the wheel turns.

Then it is cooler and the light is flat and gray. You are standing, and your hand is already moving toward your chest. You stop. Your palm lies flat on a shirt, and under the palm are ribs, and over the ribs a softness the lifeguard never had. The breath comes slow and heavy. A tie hangs loose around your neck.

The shirt gives up the first memory. It is a cheap cotton blend with a tiny pattern, and the cuffs are rough against your wrists. Your wife ironed it on Sunday, badly, and said so, and laughed. Her name comes up through the fabric: Marisol. You feel a tenderness that is not yours, and it lands in your chest anyway.

The tie is next, slick and cool between your fingers. He learned the knot from a video, in a bathroom, the night before a hearing he dreaded. His father never taught him. He is thirty-eight and still tying it like an apology.

Then the ring, a plain band, warm from his skin. Under it is the baby's weight on this arm, a night in a hospital chair. After that comes a different weight, a woman who is not Marisol. A car, a parking lot, a recent ending that he has told no one about. He still carries it like a stone in a pocket. You flinch from it and cannot put it down.

The carpet is thick under his socks and the room smells of laundry and body spray. His feet ache in the good shoes. His knees complain. Without being asked, his tongue goes looking for a toothpick that is not there.

You turn your hand over. It is broad, brown, and steady, and it is not yours. You lift your eyes.

"Well," you say, "let's see what you were keeping."

You wonder how long this one lasts, and whether you will still be him tomorrow, or in four minutes.