Gary Dunleavy

You are standing in a hallway in Seattle with a mop bucket at your hip, and the bucket is the reason. Dave Lindqvist has been yours for less than a minute and already he is wrong. His shoulders ache from a night of other people's floors. The scar through his eyebrow itches when you frown. You have the keys to a building that is not yours, and a radio on the cart is playing a song you do not like, and nothing in him wants anything. That is the trouble with him. He is a quiet man, and you have been quiet for a full minute, and you want the wheel.

You let go of the mop handle. It clatters. You open the page.

The wheel turns, and the click comes.

Under a strip light the board reads 48, and your knee, his knee, stops bouncing on the same click. You did not stop it. It stopped because you arrived. Your right hand sets a paper cup of water down square on the molded seat beside you, and the water has gone warm. Then your hands fold, and they know how. Someone says a name from a window. It is his name. You do not look up.

The first thing is the shirt. Blue cotton, soft at the cuffs, a button gone loose on the pocket. It comes with a closet door and a hand on a hanger in dim morning, and it is her voice from the kitchen saying *wear the blue one, it's the DMV, they like you in blue.* Not the DMV. Something else, a hearing, a form. His stomach is tight about it. He buttoned each cuff slowly, left first, because the wedding band catches on the sleeve.

The ring. You turn your thumb against it and a whole kitchen opens: thirty-some years of one woman's back at one stove, a dish towel over her shoulder, her laughing at him for the rag he always forgets is in his pocket. He loves her the plain way, like a floor he stands on. No children, and a room at the end of the hall they never call anything.

The paper in your fist is a ticket, damp from his palm. Under it, the cold molded plastic of the chair against his thighs, and the belt biting his belly a notch too tight. His back hurts low on the left, the way it does after a morning under a car. There are two bays, a lift that sticks, a radio, a drip of oil he knows by sound. Under the nails, in the creases of the knuckles, it stays even when he scrubs. His hands know a torque wrench better than they know his own face. They know how to wait too.

His shoes smell of rubber and old coffee. At Mass his mother's rosary was always in her pocket. He has a Saint Christopher in the glove box, and he is not sure he believes, and he keeps it anyway.

Your knee wants to bounce. It has always wanted to. You hold it still, and it trembles like an engine you shut off too early.

You lift your hands and look at them. Broad, freckled, a gold ring worn thin. You turn them over. Then you look up at the light, at the number, at whoever is watching, and you say, low and rough, "Forty-eight." It is only a number. It is all you have of him so far.

How long, you wonder. The knee starts again.