Glenn Overholt

Travis Hensley's legs ache in a way I have decided not to like. It's the middle of the morning in a kitchen in Ohio, and a child's cereal has gone to paste in a bowl by the sink. I've been this man for one minute. He is thirty-three and five-foot-six, and he has a beard that itches. The whole house is built for somebody who loves the small hours of it, and I find I am only counting them. I wanted to carry something heavy. I wanted a man whose body is asked for things. Travis's is asked for snacks and shoe-finding. So I put the wet spoon down, and the page with the wheel opens, and I spin.

Then the saw is already in my right hand, shrieking, and I am in the middle of the cut.

Early dark, Seattle. The street through the framing is wet and the coffee shop across it glows like a held breath. Sawdust hangs in the air, and I taste it, resin and cold. The board is under my left hand, flat, and the blade is eating a line I did not draw. Something in the rhythm broke, a half second wrong, and I feel the body correct it. I draw the saw back, slow, and set it again. Then I do the next cut, and check it. And the next.

His leg won't stop bouncing. The left heel drums the plywood whenever I stop thinking about it. Six-three: the world sits lower than I'm used to, and my shoulders are wide and warm, and a long muscle in my lower back has a complaint it has made for years. Fifty-three. The knees know it.

I set the saw down and the vest brushes my chest, stiff mesh, and the memory comes up through it.

The vest on a nail by the door, in the dark of a kitchen. A wife's voice from the stairs, thick with sleep: *take the good gloves, it's going to pour.* He did not take them. He was thinking about a header that was bothering him. Her voice is warm in him like a coat.

The flannel against my back, a sleeve rolled to the elbow, then the other. He rolls them the same way every morning, left first. Under it, his hands know a belt buckle, brown leather, worn soft at the third hole. The pencil behind his ear is a daughter's choice. She sharpened it with a kitchen knife when she was nine, badly, and he keeps it. I feel the pride come before the picture does: a girl at a table, tongue between her teeth, grown now and far away.

The ring on my left hand is a plain band, thin from years of work. I turn it with my thumb. A different woman, years back, a church basement, folding chairs, a bad divorce settled on a Tuesday. It still lives in him as a quiet room he doesn't enter. Then the second wedding, and Mass, and his knees on the kneeler, his lips moving without sound.

My boots are wet through at the left toe. The memory there is only the sound of rain on a first roof he ever framed, a boy of nineteen, proud.

I hold my hands out in front of me, big, scarred by nothing, and turn them over. Mine. I look up across the wet street, past the glowing window, to where anyone is looking.

"Well," I say, in a voice lower than any I've owned. "Let's see how long you last."

I don't know whether that's to him, or to me.