Greg Lindqvist

You are tired of the carpenter. You have been him for under a minute, and already he is wrong. The beard itches against your collar. The gap in the front teeth whistles on every S, and your tongue keeps going to it like a thumb to a split nail. He is tall and loose and you cannot stop noticing how much air there is above your head. It is the middle of a Tuesday in New York, a table saw is howling somewhere behind a wall, and you stand in his shop doing nothing. You came back to the page and the wheel because he was a man who could build things, and you do not want to build things. You wanted to be someone who is finished. You pay, you spin, and the spoke clicks past a name you will not remember.

Then there is a lawn.

You are halfway across it, already moving, the handle of a mower in both fists and your weight leaning into it. It is a bright, hard morning. Your right foot is mid-step and it lands wrong, a short stutter, a stride that doesn't match the machine. You stop. You do the step again, slowly and correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, because your body is doing a job it has done for years and you are not in on it.

The grass is loud under the engine. Something green is over your ears, hanging on a cord at your neck, and the sun on the brim of a hat throws a shade across your face. The air is thin and dry. Mountains stand behind the rooflines, pale slabs of stone, and a brick porch is on your right.

The shirt comes first. Soft, washed-out blue, and the cotton is thin at the elbows. It gives you this morning in his hands: a dark kitchen, the cuffs rolled twice, a button done up crooked and corrected. A coffee going cold on the counter. He prayed over it, standing, one hand flat on the counter. Short and plain, thanks for work, thanks for the day. You did not ask for the prayer. It arrives with a calm so settled you could lean on it.

The handles are next, the grips worn smooth where a thumb goes. A hundred thousand passes come up through the palms. Fall cleanups, a crew he had once and let go, a client who never paid. The drone of it lets a man think. He thinks mostly about nothing, and about her.

You look at the left hand on the bar. The ring finger has a band of pale skin where gold used to sit. A flash: a kitchen table, a lawyer's pen, her not crying, him not either. After that he went to church alone and sat in the back. Twelve years of marriage, no children, a silence in the house that was never about anything. He still checks his phone at lunch out of habit.

The body is forty-five and five-foot-five and built like a fence post. Lower back sore from the lifting, a knee that clicks, forearms hard as rope. The scalp at the crown is hot under the hat. His mouth remembers cigarettes the way a tongue remembers a pulled tooth. Seven years quit. He has a little money put away, not much, and he counts it more often than he spends it.

You let go of the mower. The engine drops to idle. You turn your hands over, the pale stripe on the ring finger, the grass-green stain in the creases. They are not yours and they are completely yours.

You look up and say, to nobody, "Well. Hello, Greg."

Somewhere the wheel is already turning in you, a quiet question with no answer: how long, and when the wanting comes back.