Glenn Ostrander

You are standing in Tom Pelletier's kitchen with his truck keys in your fist, and you have been him for less than a minute. His dimples are still new to you. The chinstrap itches. His knees ache the way a man's do after a day in the bucket of a lift, and the whole house smells of sawdust and cold coffee.

You paid again because he was easy, and easy was the trouble. You had barely finished the thought of him before you wanted something that could not be bought with one more tree. You do not say that to yourself. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then there is a broom in your hands.

The rhythm of it is already running when you arrive: push, flick, push. Then your wrist does it wrong. The bristles skip, and your body corrects itself slowly, the way you would tell a child. You do it again, carefully. Again. Ten strokes, each one checked, on a floor that has not needed checking in years.

The broom handle is cool and worn smooth at one spot. It gives you a flash that is his, not yours: a principal's voice, a long time ago, saying *you missed a corner*, and the heat in his neck when he fixed it. After that he never missed a corner again. The pride in it is small and hard, like a stone kept in a pocket.

The keys hang at your hip on their carabiner. When they swing against your thigh you get a kitchen with a tilted floor, a trailer on blocks, and a woman's voice calling *the blue one's the shed*. You are fond of the voice, though it is not yours to be. There is a girl's laugh in it, and a boy's cough from another room.

The shirt rubs your shoulders. You feel the morning in it, sleeve by sleeve: his left arm in first, the cuff buttoned, then the right. He rolled both sleeves twice, as he does, in the dark of the bedroom so as not to wake her. The wedding band clicked against the button. He did not look in the mirror. He combed his hair to the hard side part by feel, wet, the way his father did.

The tattoo on your upper arm tingles under the cloth. It is a crest from a team he stopped following when he was twenty-six and never stopped wearing. A hot summer comes with it, a friend's garage, and a needle. The friend is dead now. You feel that arrive and settle, heavy and quiet.

Under your boots the tile is cold and slick. The window beside you has gone the blue of the hour after sun, and outside the sagebrush stands up in the dusk. Past it, a single-wide sits on its blocks with the light on. It is his. A sharp ache goes through you that is only partly his.

His back hurts low on the right. His forearms are strong, and the stubble on your jaw is rough against your collar. There is a little money put away, a number he repeats to himself at night, and a first wife he is still careful around.

You let go of the broom with one hand and turn it over. The ring catches the fluorescent light. You look up, straight ahead.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is not yours yet. "Let's see how long you last."

The wheel is already somewhere behind your eyes, waiting.