Kevin Osterhaus

Three minutes in Brendan Coyle and already the shine is off him. You're standing on a roof frame in the Sunset, mid-morning fog not yet burned off, and his knees ache in a way that tells you he's thirty going on fifty, that roofing does this to a man on a schedule you didn't agree to. The scar through his eyebrow itches, phantom, some old fight that isn't yours to remember properly, just a flicker of a bar and a fist and nothing else. You spun for this. You spun and got a roofer with bad knees and a face already going somewhere you don't want to follow it. Twenty-two men before him and you know the tell by now — the wanting drains out of a body fast when the body itself is telling you no. So you take out your phone, right there on the joists, thumb the site open before you've even climbed down, and you spin again because you can, because there's a wheel and it doesn't care that you just got here.

The leash goes slack in your hand.

You're standing on a sidewalk somewhere that smells like cut grass and somebody's charcoal grill three yards over, and the light is doing something strange — going yellow and thick, like weather is stacking up behind you though you haven't turned to look yet. A dog is nosing a hedge, unbothered, and your hand — thick fingers, a plain black watch loose on the wrist — has stopped feeding out the leash. You wind it twice without deciding to. The dog looks up, ears back, reading something in you it doesn't have a word for, and then it accepts the new pace because dogs do that faster than people.

The cap on your head sits backward, worn soft at the brim from other hands. The shirt against your back — plaid, unbuttoned, a gray tee under it — comes with a morning: him standing in a bedroom that still has one nightstand instead of two, six months since she took the other one, buttoning this same flannel with the sleeves already rolled because rolling them after never sits right. Coffee in a truck-stop cup going cold on the dresser. A photo on the wall of a girl, four years old, gap-toothed, that he touches every morning on his way out of the room, first two fingers, a habit older than a ritual, not quite a prayer though it lives in the same part of him the church does.

The boots under you know 40,000 miles of pedal and clutch and gravel lot. Your shoulders know a sleeper cab, the particular ache of a mattress six inches too short, the CB static of Highway 83 outside Colby before dawn. There's a woman — Danielle — who left in March, and it wasn't dramatic, it was just tired, the two of them tired in different directions until there was nothing left pointed the same way. The custody weekends are good ones, though; you feel that clean in his chest, an actual lightness, the only unmixed thing in him. Sunday drop-offs are the worst hour of his month and he never says so to anyone.

You feel the gut first, the way the shirt sits on it, a working man's soft weight, no shame in his hands about it, just fact. You feel the crew cut under the cap, sweated flat. You feel a body that has never once smoked and drunk maybe twice this month, big and stupid and fun both times, karaoke and a coworker's bachelor party, and otherwise gone to bed early because four a.m. doesn't wait on anybody's night. There's a thunderhead behind you — you can feel it now that the memory's given you the season, given you the wheat stubble cut flat for a county in every direction — black and stacking, and some part of him, some farm-kid instinct three generations deep, is already thinking about getting the dog inside before it breaks.

The leash is warm from his palm. The dog tugs, impatient, toward home.

You look down at your own hand — thick, sun-browned to the wrist line, a thin pale watch-tan beneath the black band — and turn it over like it might mean something written on the palm.

"Storm's comin'," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that isn't yours and wasn't his either, not really, not anymore — and you don't look at the sky. You look at the hand a second longer, and somewhere far off, still fogged in, still up on a roof he'll never finish, a man named Brendan Coyle is standing empty with a nail gun in his grip, and you don't think about him again.