Gary Halvorsen

Walter Grzeski's hands — your hands, for less than a minute now — smell like chalk and steam-press starch, and they are already bored of themselves. You stand in the fitting-room light with a client's cuff pinned between two fingers, and you feel the old itch under Walter's ribs that has nothing to do with Walter at all. Sixty years old, skinny fat, dimples like a boy's gone soft with age — a fine enough coat to wear for an afternoon, but you have had it less than a minute and already you are thinking about the next one. That's the truth of it, the thing you wouldn't say to the client bleeding into the mirror in front of you: you don't want to be anyone long enough to find out what's wrong with them. Sixty-one men behind you and every one of them started interesting and ended like a Tuesday. You set down the pins. You tell the client something about the shoulder needing another look. You go to the back room, to the laptop already open on the cutting table, to the wheel already spinning before your thumb even finishes the click.

It is the middle of a Saturday where Walter is. It is the middle of a different Saturday four hundred miles and one hour west, and the rain there does not care what time your body thinks it is.

The water hits your face like a hand.

You are upright, hooded, mid-step off a curb, and the world has gone gray and vertical with rain — a bus shelter behind you, concrete and a lit sign reading 3 MIN receding at your back, and your hood is already sliding off your skull because some decision was made a half-second before you arrived to want it. Your face tips up into the rain and doesn't come back down. Water runs into your collar. Somewhere below you a pair of boots you have never stood in take your weight without asking, and they know how, because the body has done this ten thousand times and you have done it never.

The jacket is heavier than Walter's coats, quilted, gone slick and dark at the shoulders, and touching its zipper — your own hand finds it there at the throat, tugged three-quarters up — throws you sideways into a kitchen at six in the morning, fluorescent under-cabinet light, a woman's voice saying *you'll catch your death* not because she believes it but because it's what you say to a man for thirty years. Diane. The name comes with the smell of her coffee, weaker than you like it, and you — no, he — drinks it anyway because an argument about coffee at six a.m. isn't worth having with three kids still asleep upstairs and a dog scratching at the back door. His name is there now too, arriving the way a word arrives when you've forgotten it and then haven't: Gary. Gary Halvorsen. Refrigeration. Twenty-six years of walk-in coolers and compressor coils and a company polo he stopped wearing because the quilted jacket holds heat better in February, and February in Chicago is a longer season than the calendar admits.

The rain keeps coming and it doesn't feel like an assault, it feels like church — not the metaphor of church, the actual thing, a Sunday twenty years back when the roof of Redeemer Bible leaked during the Fanning boy's baptism and everybody laughed instead of minding, because water was supposed to fall on you sometimes and mean something. Gary quit drinking the year after that, quietly, without a program, just stopped one Tuesday and never said why to anyone who asked, and the rain on his face now is doing something the whiskey used to do, some old switch in him that likes to be doused.

Your feet are planted in runoff over the tops of his boots, socks already soaked, and that's his body's problem now too — size ten and a half, flat-footed from thirty years of concrete floors, a lower back that clicks when he bends for a service panel and a right knee that remembers every ladder he's climbed with a manifold gauge slung on his shoulder like the one still tangled at your collarbone, red and blue hose looped there from some job not yet started or just finished, you can't tell which and the body doesn't volunteer it. There's a dull sweetish thirst at the back of your throat that isn't about the rain — his blood sugar, quietly wrong the way it's been wrong for six years, a truth his hands know before his mind does, the same hands that without being told anything are already patting his jacket pocket for a pen that isn't there to click.

The wedding band is cold on his left hand, colder than the rest of him, and touching it with your thumb gives you a church basement, a woman named Carol in a blue dress her mother hated, twenty-nine years ago, and the specific unglamorous joy of a man who married exactly once and never once wondered what else there might have been. Three kids after that, then one more, grown now, out of the house, one of them married herself with a baby who calls him Bumpa. None of that is dramatic. None of it needs to be. It sits in him the way water sits in a good coat — soaked all the way through and none of it showing on the surface, because Gary Halvorsen has never been a man anyone looked at twice, not even this morning, pulling this exact jacket off its hook by the kitchen door while Diane said something about the bus schedule changing on Saturdays and he said he'd check the board when he got there.

He was going in on a Saturday because Saturday is when the reach-in unit at the deli off Lawrence started screaming, and screaming compressors don't wait for Monday, and a man who has quit almost everything else in his life has not quit being the guy who comes.

You look down at his hands. Blunt fingers, a callus along the second knuckle where a service wrench sits a thousand times a year, water running off them onto the wet concrete, the band bright and small and entirely unglamorous, worth nothing and worth everything, the only decoration the man ever wore on purpose.

You lift your face out of it, into whatever is watching, and Walter's old dry laugh comes out of a Chicago refrigeration tech's mouth, low, almost fond.

"Well," you say, "that's new."

Somewhere behind that word is the wheel, still warm from your last click, and no telling — not to you, not to him, not to anyone — how long you mean to let it wait.