Fadi Haddad

You are standing at a kitchen counter in Queens, in a dead man's robe, which is what you've started calling Frank Mulvaney, though nothing happened to him that you didn't cause. Less than a minute in him. His knees complained when you stood. His freckled hands held a glass of milk you didn't want. The refrigerator hummed. In the hall a clock he'd wound for forty years ticked on, and you understood, looking at the glass, that you had spent everything on a man who sat in the dark and was content to. Retired. Nothing to carry. Nobody to lift for. You wanted weight, work, a body with a reason to be tired. You set the milk down and the phone was already in your hand.

The wheel turns. Then there is a road.

Dark highway, and the dash glow lies green on knuckles that aren't yours. The truck drifts a foot toward the line and you pull it back in one smooth stroke. His arms know the correction before you do. Your hands come off the wheel and resettle lower and wider, and your thumb finds the signal stalk and ticks it on for an exit that isn't his. You don't know why. His hand knew.

The wheel under your palms is cracked vinyl, worn smooth at ten and two, and the grain of it opens something. A scaffold at dawn, cold in the planks, and the first course of a wall laid true, the line string humming. Pride, plain as bread. The trowel's handle is in your palm though no trowel is here, and your wrist already knows the flick that throws mortar and the tap that seats a brick.

Your belly presses the wheel, a solid weight, and your back aches low and honest, a fifty-five-year ache earned in a day of lifting. Your shoulders are thick and strong. Your knees are stiff where pads have ground them into the ground for decades.

The jacket cuffs scratch your wrists, and the jacket gives you the morning: a hook by a door, his wife's hand holding it open for him, the zipper sticking at the same tooth it always sticks at. He swore softly in Arabic and she laughed, and he felt the dimples come, felt them every time she laughed. Under the jacket the shirt is damp and gritty with brick dust. He pulled it over his head in the dark, one sleeve and then the other, quietly, so the child would sleep.

The ring on your left hand turns when you grip. A warm kitchen, her name, a daughter's school shoes by the door. Another flash, older and sharper: a girl on a stairwell, years ago, a goodbye he never quite finished. It lands as a small ache, tucked away like a stone in a pocket. Then a Kingdom Hall, folding chairs, the careful quiet of men in ties, and his own hands folded on his knee.

Three miles. Your signal keeps ticking. You let it, and for a moment you don't know if it is yours or his.

You lift your right hand off the wheel and turn it over in the green light. Thick fingers, a scar of dust in every crease, the gold band. Strong. Tired. Yours.

You look up into the dark glass and say, "Well. Let's see how far you go."

Nothing answers. Somewhere ahead is an exit, and you don't know how long you'll want it.