Leon Pettiway

You are Walt Pruitt, and you have been him for two minutes. The truck is idling in a yard that smells of cut pipe and hot dust. Your broken nose is filling with heat. Your knees, six-foot-five worth of them, are telling you the ladder was a mistake. The wrench is still in your fist, and under the callus you feel it: this man has done this ten thousand times and loved none of them. It is mid-morning, a Tuesday, and he has a basement to get under. You are already tired of his shoulders. They are enormous and they do nothing you want. You have wanted a smaller room all morning, a quieter one, and you will not say why. So you let go of the wrench and open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then you are standing, one hand out, the other holding a blood pressure cuff against the edge of a table, and the paper under it crackles. Light comes through a big window, and a dry palm leans in it. It is the same second. You are very light, and your breath is thin and unhurried. Your hand has already begun a motion without you, and you watch it go wrong. The cuff slips a quarter inch. You do it again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more times, each checked, because something in this body has just remembered to be afraid of its own habit.

The coat is the first thing. Cotton, starched at the collar, and it carries him up: the closet, a hanger that has to be pulled twice because the rod is crowded. A wife's voice from the kitchen asking if he ate. He did not. He buttoned the coat over the plaid shirt slowly because his fingers are stiffer before noon, and he stood a second and let them work. The tie knot comes next, rubbing your throat. His father wore this knot, a four-in-hand, learned at a church door on a Sunday. Your thumb finds the ring on your left hand and turns it, once, twice, and a whole evening opens: a porch, two small children asleep across a couch, her head on his shoulder, the television low, his gratitude so large it has no object.

The stethoscope is cold against your neck, and the cold becomes a patient, a boy of nine, breathing wrong, and the long minute where he listened and was right. You feel the right of it, quiet and enormous. The sleeve rides up and you do not look at the arm. The skin there remembers a needle, a younger man, a night he promised something to God and meant it, and the promise has been kept every day since, mostly in small ways. A woman's name drifts up, an old girlfriend, a letter in a drawer, and it is only a soft ache now, like a tooth that has stopped. His feet hurt in the arches. His back is a long careful column. His knees have opinions about the stool. The room smells of alcohol swabs and warm dust, and it is enough. It has always been enough, and he has never once said so aloud.

You raise your hands and look at them. They are narrow and brown, and they are not shaking. The ring is bright on the left. You turn them over, palm up, as if they might say who they belong to.

"Hello, Doctor," you say, and the voice is soft, and it is not yours, and it is. Somewhere a door is waiting. You do not know whether you will still be here when the patient comes in, or at lunch, or tomorrow, or whether the wanting will start again before you have learned where he keeps his keys.