Neil Garrity

You are leaving Cody Hartwell because of the scar. It is a small thing and it is the whole reason. All morning in the store, under the fluorescents, your thumb has kept going to the break in his eyebrow, finding the gap in the hair, and the gap is his. It is somebody else's fall from a bike, a bottle, a childhood, and you do not have the story. A man with a scar has a story, and you have been carrying around a hole where it should be. The truck keys are warm in your fist. A pallet of water has to be counted. You open the page on the phone, the wheel is already turning, and you are standing in the desert morning and then you are not.

Wet air. A lobby, tall windows, rain running down them. You are mid-step, the right foot just landing on stone, and your weight comes down in a body wider than the last one, softer through the middle, easy about it. The left hand is closed around a handle. The right hand is hooked in a strap on your shoulder. A suitcase follows on its small wheels. A neon COFFEE sign across the street smears red in the glass. The rhythm of the walk breaks for half a second, the stride wrong, and you correct it slowly, heel then toe. Then you do it again, and again, ten times, each step checked, though this man has not needed to check his walking in decades.

The handle comes first. Hard plastic, a rubber grip worn smooth where his palm sits, and a flash comes up in his feeling and not yours: an airport at dawn, the same handle, a small voice on a phone saying Daddy, bring me the little soaps. Pride and an ache together, a daughter, six, who collects the hotel soaps in a shoebox. He has never once come home without them.

The strap on your shoulder is canvas, rough, heavy with a laptop. Under it comes a spreadsheet, a quarter missed, the sour taste of a Thursday call, then a quarter beaten, a steak dinner, loosened tie. He is good at this. He likes people more than he admits. The lanyard swings against your chest, the card's plastic edge tapping the button there, and something opens about the badge picture, taken on a bad morning, and his girlfriend laughing at it on the fridge, her thumb over his face.

The blazer. Navy, a little tight across the back when you reach. The shirt under it is soft from washing, and it gives you the morning, sleeve by sleeve. His right arm in first, then the left, the cuff buttons done by feel in the dark of the bedroom so as not to wake her. The belt pulled one notch past where it was last year. The mirror, the grey curls, a hand pushed through them, a wink at himself that was mostly a joke. A kiss on a sleeping head. Rosary beads in the dish by the door, his mother's, which he touched and left.

Your feet hurt in the good dress shoes, the arches tired. Forty-one years of knees, a stiff low back, a dull pull in the calves from standing at a booth yesterday. The jaw is smooth under your fingers, shaved close, and the cheeks lift on their own against you, deep creases pressing in. The smell of coffee and wet wool reaches him, and a cigar in a coat pocket, saved for Saturday, a small private plan he has told no one.

You stop beside a chair and lift your free hand into the window light. It is broad, pale, a little freckled, nails clean, a thumb that already knows the shape of a pen. You turn it over. Nothing on it that you did not expect, and none of it yours. You look up.

"Neil," you say, trying it, and the dimples arrive before you decide. How long does this one last? Until the wanting comes back, and you can feel it already, small, somewhere behind his ribs, deciding.