Neil Brandvold

You are done with Sam Gruber's hands. It is the plainest thing you can say about it. Three minutes in him, standing in the bay of a garage in Small-town Ohio with the noon sun on the concrete, a torque wrench hanging from one fist, and you cannot stop feeling how small he is. Five-eight. Everything you reach for is a little too high, and the cuffs of the world come up short. The goatee itches. Under the lift a transmission is waiting for a man who knows what he is doing, and your body knows. It wants to do it, and you don't. You pay and you spin, and the wheel is already turning before the wrench touches the floor.

Then it is green. A hedge, wet and close, and the smell of cut leaves and cold fog burning off the pavement. Your arm is out in front of you with something in the hand, a plastic grip with a spring in it. The weight of the body drops in all at once: height, so much of it, the ground a long way down. A dog is nosing the hedge at the end of a black line. Your feet are not moving, because his feet had stopped.

The jacket comes first, canvas, soft at the elbows, and it hands you a morning: a closet door held open with a knee, three kids' shoes in the hall, a wife saying *you'll be late* and not meaning it, and him standing there with the zipper halfway up, grateful and tired, a gratitude with no words in it. The grip of the leash is warm, worn smooth where his thumb rides the lock button, and it gives you a night: a rescue shelter, a dog shaking in the corner, the youngest crying until he said *him, that one*. The keys are not on him, but the habit of them is, the hip remembering a weight. His hand drifts up on its own and rubs the jaw, the short beard, then the nose, the crooked bridge. A flash: a fall off a loading dock at nineteen, the crunch, his own laugh through the blood. The knees ache a little, thirty-eight years of Friday nights on a hard floor at the host stand. He stands at the front of a full room and smooths a hundred small disasters with a smile, and he is good at it. The shirt memory comes up too, black, buttoned top to bottom in the dark while the house slept, sleeve, sleeve, cuff, the pen clicked into the pocket. That is tonight's shirt and not this morning's, but the habit is all one thing. Under it there is a prayer he says without moving his lips, and a name he does not say at all, a woman from before his marriage, a few months gone and still sitting in his chest like a swallowed stone. Money is thin. He counts it every night in his head and always comes out the same.

The dog looks up. Ears flat. It knows. You wind the leash twice around the hand, because the hand knows how, and you start off, and the dog has to learn the stride.

You hold the hand up. Big, square, a plain gold band on the left, and it is not Sam's, and it is not yours, and it is warm.

"Well," you say, in a voice that comes from lower than you expected. "Hello, you."

You wonder how long. Until you want something else, and you can feel the wanting already, small and far away, asleep.