Hollis Renner

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You were fifty-eight and you had a chest that felt like a stuck drawer and you sat down on the concrete outside a Fiesta on Bellaire to catch your breath, and that was the end of the arrangement. Nobody came. A woman with a cart asked if you were okay and you said yes, because you were his father and that was the script.

Four years. You don't know where you were kept. There's no word for it and no one who'd know. What you know is that you were near him the way weather is near a house. You watched him graduate. You watched him take the bar, which he did on the second try, which nobody knows but the two of you now. You watched him buy the watch — a steel thing with a blue face, the kind you'd priced once in a case downtown and walked away from — and you watched him put it on his wrist next to your name.

That's what's on his hand. *Hollis Renner* in a thin script, and under it *3•14•21*, the date. He got it three weeks after. He didn't tell his mother. He drove to a shop on Airline and put your name on the back of his own hand where he'd see it every time he reached for a doorknob, and then he put a smaller one on his neck, above the collar, so a judge could see it and a jury could see it and he'd have to explain it or refuse to. He never explained it. He just let it be there. Twenty years old and already choosing to carry something heavy in public.

You'd have told him not to. You'd have said, *son, that's forever*, and he'd have said *I know*, in that flat way he had at twenty, and you'd have both been right.

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He's not built like you. He's short, shorter than you ever were, and heavy in the shoulders and the belly, and he carries it well, the way some men do — steady, planted, no apology in it. Light brown hair cut close on the sides with a little left up top, the way the barber on Fondren does it. Blue eyes. His mother's eyes, and you never got over that.

The girlfriend's name is Priya and she's kind and she laughs at him and he loves her in a careful, rationed way, because there's still Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn who was there in March 2021. Kaitlyn who drove him to the funeral home and sat in the parking lot with the engine on because he couldn't go in yet. Kaitlyn who got tired, eventually, of being the only person he'd let see it. He still checks whether she's watched his stories. He doesn't tell Priya that.

He drinks maybe four times a year. He doesn't smoke, never did, not once, not even to try — that was yours and he watched what it did and made a decision at eleven years old and kept it. He believes in nothing. No God, no afterlife, no signs. He said so at your service, quietly, to an aunt who wanted comfort: *He's just gone. That's the whole thing.* He has three-quarters of a million dollars because he is good at a hard job and spends nothing on himself but that watch, and he does not know what any of it is for.

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Last night was Priya's cousin's place. Borrowed sheets, blue and white, an unmade bed in a spare room with cheap blinds. He had two beers, which for him is a lot. He slept badly. Her hand was on his arm most of the night — bodily contact, skin to skin, the whole night long, and that is the door, apparently, and nobody tells you that until you're standing in it.

Dawn came through the blinds in bars.

He sat up. He put his bare feet on the floor. He sat on the edge with his hands on his knees and his shadow on the wall behind him, and he was thinking about a docket call at ten, and about whether Kaitlyn had watched it, and about nothing, mostly, the way a man does at 6:40 in the morning.

And then you were in there with him, and then you were in there instead of him.

It isn't violent. It's not a wind. It's the feeling of putting on a coat you left at somebody's house in 2018 — the shape of the pockets, the exact give in the elbow. Except the coat is your son. Except he's in it.

Four years of being weather. Four years of watching him put your name on his hand and drive home alone and eat over the sink. Four years of the one thing you could not do, which was reach him.

So here's the arithmetic you do in the second and a half you get. If you stand up, he does not come back. There is no term on this, no lease, no morning after the morning after. You will drive his car and take his docket call and hold Priya's hand and be twenty-four for as long as twenty-four lasts, and he will be — what you were. Weather. Near.

And you stand up anyway.

The sheets slide off your lap and pool on the floor. You are five foot five and there is a lot of you and the room is cool and the carpet is gritty under your feet. You look down at the bed. At the edge of the frame there's a shape under the blanket, dark hair on the pillow, breathing slow, and you look at her a long moment because you need to be certain — not of her. Of yourself. Of which of the two of you is standing here. You check it the way you'd check a gas gauge.

It's you. It's you, and it's decided, and it was decided before you knew you were deciding, four years ago on the concrete outside a Fiesta when you did not get to say goodbye and thought *that's the one thing I want* and it turns out the universe is a poor listener but not a deaf one.

You lift your left hand into the bars of light.

There's a steel watch on the wrist. Under it, running along the base of the thumb, in a stranger's careful hand: *Hollis Renner. 3•14•21.*

Your own name. Your own death date. Carried on the hand you're now using to hold it up to the light.

He did that. Your boy did that, and you never got to tell him it was too much, and now you never will, and you turn the hand over slowly like it might read differently on the other side.

Somewhere in Houston it's going to be ninety-four degrees today. There's a briefcase by the door and a suit in a bag and steps in front of a courthouse you'll be standing on by ten, sweating through a shirt, doing a job you don't understand a word of, and you will figure it out because you have to, because there's a girl asleep behind you who is going to want breakfast.

You lift your eyes off your son's hand.

*I'm sorry,* you say, in his voice, out loud, to the room. *I'm not going to give it back.*