Lamont Whitfield

You are Hector Almaraz, and you have been him for less than a minute, and already you hate how the chair holds your back. The claims queue is open on the monitor, forty files, all of them somebody's flooded basement. Your hands know the keys. Your wife's name is on a mug by the keyboard, and the mug means nothing to you. It's the middle of a Tuesday morning in Philadelphia and everything in here is paid for and finished. Nothing is left to want, and you want. You pay. You spin. The wheel clicks down through its colors and you let go of the desk.

Cold. That is first, cold in the nose, a hard clean cold that tastes of iron and wet salt. Your weight is already forward on a seat, your thighs gripping a frame, your hands on grips you did not reach for. A winter noon pours white over brick, and iron girders climb over your head. Somewhere above, a train goes over, and the whole street hums with it. Your right hand was moving. You feel it catch, the wrong motion, so you do it again slowly, correctly. Then ten more times, each one checked, thumb, brake, thumb, as if the thing might bite.

Then the jacket speaks. The nylon shell is stiff at the cuffs and soft at the elbows, and when your shoulders settle into it a morning comes up unasked. It's dark in a bedroom, and a man's back is turned to him, breathing slow. He dresses by the light of the hall so as not to wake him. Left arm, right arm, the cuff strap pulled with his teeth. He stands in the doorway a moment longer than he needs to. Love, plain as a hand on the shoulder. Not yours. You hold still and let it go through you.

The grips are rubber, worn smooth where his palms sit. Under them, a Sunday: a hall with folding chairs, his two children small in good shoes, one of them swinging his legs. He is proud and he is tired, and nobody there knows he is tired. The ring on your left hand turns when you flex your fingers, and he was nineteen once, and there was another man, one who left, one who is still a room he does not enter. He does not enter it now. You feel him close that door with practiced gentleness.

The pack on your back is heavy with somebody's lunch. The phone against your chest buzzes. Your fingers are drumming the grip, a quick light pattern, and you did not tell them to. Your knees ache in the cold, a dull old complaint, and your shoulders are broad and strong, and there is a breath in this chest that goes deep and steady as a bellows. Fifty-four years, and the money never quite enough, and the husband's laugh in the kitchen, and the ink on the inside of your forearm warm under the sleeve. He has never touched a drink. He has never needed to.

You lift your right hand off the grip. You turn it over. Brown palm, the fine geometry of the tattoo, the plain band. A good hand, a working one, and it is yours.

You look up, and say to the street, low: "All right. Let's see how long you let me."