Gordon Pelletier

You are standing in a hallway of steel doors, and the keys on Raymond Villarreal's belt are the only thing you have ever hated this much. Fifty-seven years in him, less than a minute, and already he is a weight: the knees, the shaved scalp cold under the fluorescent hum, a moustache that tastes of the coffee he drank before you came. A man in a cell is shouting a number at nothing. It is the middle of a Tuesday morning here, and nothing is wrong. That is what sent you back. Nothing is wrong, and nothing in this body is going to happen to you that has not already happened to the keys.

You spin the wheel. You do not decide it, and you are not asked.

Your thumb comes down on the envelope, and the pen stops on the second digit.

It is a kitchen, the same second, a different morning. The hold music loops back to its first bar, and the phone slides off a shoulder that is not yours into a hand that is. You are mid-motion. His breath is in you and the pen is still in your fingers, and you are holding the 4 and the 7 of someone's reference number with a blue circle drawn around them.

The counter edge is against your hip, and a memory rises through it. A different kitchen, a woman's laugh, a door left open to a cold night. It is his feeling, not yours: something he shut and never opened again. It goes.

The sweater is not here. The polo is. It is cotton gone soft, damp at the collar, and as it moves on your shoulders you feel him pulling it over his head in a dark bedroom, one arm and then the other. He thought *another day of other people's mistakes*, and he was almost fond of it. The cargo pants are heavy at the thigh. The pocket holds his keys, and when your knuckle finds them you get a mezzanine, a rail under his forearms, and a floor of forklifts below like animals he has learned to name. Pride, plain and sudden, in a hundred men getting home on time.

The pen is warm. His hand knows the way to hold it better than yours would. The jaw is clenched, and you let it go, and it clamps again by itself. Under that clench is a year he does not let anyone see: the money, a lot of it, and no one to say it to. The tile is cool through the shoes. His back aches low, from the lifting he insists on doing himself. The beard is a stranger's hair against your phone hand. The watch bracelet on his wrist is loose, and his father's voice comes with it, saying *measure twice*. He did, and he is still alone in the kitchen.

You lift the hand and turn it over. The calluses are real and the palm is broad, and it is yours.

You look up and say, "Hello, Gordon."

And under it the old question starts again, the one you can never answer: how long. An hour, a year, or the next bar of the music.