Justin Carter

---

Danny Iwasaki's kitchen smells like drywall dust and the coffee that's been sitting since five. You've been him for forty seconds, and already you know the whole shape of the problem: the knee. Left one, been bone on bone since March, and the job is roofs and crawlspaces and forty-two years of a body that doesn't want to climb anything anymore. You feel it clench when you shift weight off the counter. Heavy body, good hands, a beauty mark under one eye that his last three girlfriends called cute. It's fine. It was fine yesterday too. But Danny Iwasaki's knee is a promise of every year from here getting a little worse, and you did not come to this site 121 times to spend your good afternoons managing a joint.

You open the laptop still on the counter, the one with the crack in the corner of the screen, and you go to the page with the wheel on it, and Danny Iwasaki's thick fingers — bitten-down nail on the thumb, someone else's habit you never bothered to break — type in the card number like it's nothing, because by now it is nothing.

You spin.

The mail is warm from your own hand around it, five, six envelopes and a coupon flyer, and your arm is already extending sideways toward a mailbox shaped like a rooster before you understand the arm is thinner than it was, the fingers longer, the sun different on your neck. One motion goes wrong — the flyer slides, corner-first, past the mailbox slot and nearly to the gravel — and you catch it, slow, deliberate, the way you'd correct a stranger's handwriting. The next ten pieces of mail get sorted like you've never done this before in your life, checked and re-checked, though the man whose hands these are has done this ten thousand times without looking.

The bag strap is against your shoulder first — canvas gone soft and dark with years of exactly this weight — and it comes with a flash: an August so hot the strap left a welt, him laughing about it to somebody on the porch of this same house, an old woman who tips him in tomatoes every summer whether he wants them or not. Then the shirt. Blue twill against your back, buttoned by hands that did it without a mirror this morning, top button skipped on purpose because the collar chokes him otherwise. You feel the exact drag of the short sleeve at the tricep where the ink starts — his back piece bleeding out at both shoulders, black tribal lines he got at nineteen and doesn't love anymore and would never say so out loud, because Deacon paid for half of it as a birthday thing three years ago, before Deacon was the one you live with, back when Deacon was still new.

Deacon. The name comes with the smell of the shirt — cigarette-and-mint, the pouch tucked under his lip right now, a slow itch of nicotine you didn't ask for — and behind Deacon there's an ex, Coy, who still texts sometimes about nothing, who this body still thinks about on the bridge, always on the bridge, because Coy used to walk it with him back before Coy decided small towns weren't worth staying faithful in. You feel that ache arrive soft and specific, not yours, his — grief with the shelf life mostly worn off it.

Under your boots, gravel then planks, the cable footbridge swaying with your steps the way it's swayed under this exact stride for six years, brown creek running below, green shade laddering down through sycamores onto your forearms. Muscle memory: how to walk it without looking down, weight forward, hand skimming the cable rail out of habit and not fear. Your body is light — skinny, 5'11", nothing on you that wasn't put there by walking routes six days a week — and it moves easy except for one thing, a faint sweetish fatigue sitting behind your eyes that has nothing to do with the heat, the diabetes ticking along quiet and unmanaged the way twenty-seven-year-olds let things tick.

A photograph flashes off nothing at all — off the shape of the mail in your hand, maybe, the ordinary act of delivering something — a photo he keeps folded in his wallet, a kid, four years old, a daughter two counties over that he sees every other weekend and loves with a fierceness that surprised him the first time he felt it, because he never planned on any of it, the marriage that made her or the divorce that followed. Getting dressed this morning comes back whole: standing in the bedroom he shares with Deacon, pulling on these same trousers, checking his phone for a message from Coy that didn't come, telling himself it didn't matter, believing it for about four seconds.

The nametag under your fingers when you touch your own chest — CARTER — feels like nothing and everything at once.

You look at your hands. Thin wrists, bitten nails, a life already lived into them that isn't yours and now is.

"Didn't used to check my own work," you say, out loud, to the empty path and the rooster mailbox and the creek going by underneath, and you don't know if that's Justin talking or you, and for the length of one breath it doesn't matter which.