Marcus Denny

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The bucket in the flower cooler leaks a thin cold line down Elias's wrist, and you hate that you can feel it, hate the skinny softness of this forearm, the give of fat over muscle that never got asked to do anything. Sixty-eight, and you keep him less than a day and you're already sick of him — sick of the migraine that lives behind his left eye, sick of the customers who call him *hon* like he's furniture, sick of how his phone won't stop buzzing with a florist supplier chasing an invoice that is not, will never be, your problem. You wipe your palm on your apron. You think: not this one. Not one more hour of this one. There's a laptop in the back office, blue light on a stool, and the wheel is already loaded in the tab because you never close the tab. You did this yesterday too. You will probably do it tomorrow. The card reader is faster than thinking. You spin.

The sidewalk doesn't arrive so much as you arrive into it — already standing, already mid-breath, already fifty-two years old in a way your last body only pretended to be. Weight drops through you like a dropped stone finding the bottom of a pond: real shoulders, real calves, a spine that has carried something for decades and knows it. The dog's ears go back. It looks up past the hedge at a face it has known its whole life and finds, for one half-second, nobody home. Your hand — his hand — has stopped. The retractable leash hangs slack, humming faintly where the cord wants to retract. Sun is warm on the buzzed scalp. A gap between his front teeth lets in a thin whistle of breath you didn't take on purpose.

You wind the leash twice, out of some animal instinct that is already becoming his instinct, and the dog has to trot to catch the new stride.

The T-shirt is what opens first — gray heather cotton, worn soft at the collar, and putting it on this morning comes back in his hands, not yours: he'd pulled it over his head standing in the bedroom with the blinds already up, Denise's side of the bed made, hers always made first, his side a wreck of a man who runs hot all night. He'd stood in front of the mirror a second longer than he needed to, checked the gray coming in at his temples that the buzzcut mostly hides, and thought, the way he thinks most mornings, *not bad, Marcus. Not bad for fifty-two.* Then the cargo shorts, the left pocket already holding his phone, the right holding nothing because he never puts anything in the right, some superstition from residency he never examined. Wedding band already on, always on, twenty-six years and he still turns it once with his thumb before he leaves the house, a tell he doesn't know he has.

The leash handle is scuffed plastic, warm from his own grip, and it gives you the retriever mutt they adopted the year their younger boy left for Kent State, when the house went quiet enough that Denise said *we need something that needs us*, and he'd agreed too fast, already grieving a kid who was only forty minutes away. That's this dog. Sasha. Twelve years married before that, though — no, twenty-six now — and under the leash-memory another one surfaces, unbidden, sharper: a woman who is not Denise, a woman named Renata from vet school who he almost married, who left for Portland with somebody else's ring on before he worked up the nerve, and some nights, not often, not for years, he still runs the tape of the apartment they almost got. He clenches his jaw about it. He doesn't know he does that. His hands don't do anything about it — they never have — they just tighten at the corner of his mouth like there's a filling back there.

The shoes on his feet remember eleven hours yesterday on the clinic's tile floor, an exam table between him and the door the whole shift, a golden retriever with a mass he had to tell a crying nineteen-year-old about, the particular ache that sets into his lower back by 4 p.m. that nothing but the recliner fixes. His blood pressure medication is in the cabinet at home, taken already this morning with orange juice standing at the counter, a habit twelve years old. He drank, once, plenty, in his twenties — quit cold before his first son was born and never missed it exactly, just missed the idea of missing it. The vape is in his other pocket, a habit that crept in to fill the exact shape the drink left. He reaches for it without deciding to, an old motion his hand knows better than his mind does, and the plastic against his palm brings back a hundred parking-lot breaks between appointments, looking at his phone, texting Denise a heart for no reason, texting his daughter about nothing.

Church is in there too — Sunday, the whole family in the second pew from the front, his voice not particularly good but loud, meaning every word of it in a way that surprises even him some weeks. Two kids raised inside that. A house worth more than he ever thought a Black kid from his part of Dayton would own, a practice that did better than fine, numbers in accounts that still, sometimes, at 2 a.m., feel like somebody else's. All of it his. All of it, until four seconds ago, entirely his.

You look down. His hand, broad, scarred faintly along one knuckle from a dog bite in year three of practice, wedding band catching the light. You turn it over, palm up, like you're checking it for something the last one didn't have.

The dog whines, straining back toward the hedge.

"Okay," you say, out loud, in his voice, to no one, to the dog, to the empty street with its one dead stoplight blinking yellow over a closed diner, "okay — let's go, girl."

You don't know if you're staying. You never do. But your thumb finds the ring and turns it once, the way his always does, and for now that's the only clock running.