Leon Pruett

You are Cody Brandon Hatchett, and you are leaving him because of a molar. It is the middle of the morning and you are standing over a chair with a mirror in one hand, a woman's mouth open under the lamp, and you cannot do it. His hands know how. They have done it a thousand times and they shake anyway, the way a stranger's would, because you keep looking for him in them and he is a minute old. He has freckles, he is heavy, and his knees hurt when he stands. None of that is the problem. The problem is that a body that knows its work does not let you borrow the knowing. You find the page again with his thumb. You pay. The wheel turns.

Gravel under one boot. Heat on the back of your neck and a strap across your shoulder, which your fingers have already caught and are lifting. A phone sits in a cradle on the handlebar and your thumb is on it, mid-swipe. You have one leg over a bike. The air smells of fryer oil and dust.

Then the swipe goes wrong. The thumb lands on the wrong corner, and you do it again slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, though the hand has never needed checking.

The jacket comes first. Nylon, thin, cold at the cuffs, and it hands you a morning: his own hands working the zipper up in a dark kitchen, a wife's voice somewhere behind him saying take the good gloves, and him saying he won't need them. The zip catches at the same place it always catches. He never fixed it. Fixing it would mean admitting something was wearing out.

The strap digs at the collarbone and gives you the bag: the first week, forty pounds of other people's lunches, and a pride so surprising it embarrassed him. Sixty-five and he could still outlast the boys. The ring on his left hand is thin and loose with sweat, and he turns it with his thumb when he is thinking. Your thumb is doing it now. A daughter, grown, somewhere far off with a phone that rings less than it should. A truck he sold. A drink he stopped, not with a speech, just one Tuesday that stayed dry and then another.

The vape in the pocket is warm against his thigh. His other hand reaches for his cheek, across the freckles, and rubs the gray stubble. He does it when he is tired. He is tired now, and underneath the tiredness the legs are strong, the lungs good, the heart steady and unbothered. This is a body that works. You wonder what you will find wrong with it.

You look at your hands. The right one turns over, the ring catching the light. Then you look up at the road, the wire fence, the water tower standing small and pale on the line of the field.

"All right," you say, in a voice that is rougher than you expected. "Let's see what you've got."

Somewhere behind your eyes the wanting is already quiet, and you do not know how long that lasts.