Nolan Brzezinski

You are nineteen, and you have been nineteen for nineteen minutes, and already you know why you are leaving.

Tanner Mockler's apartment is dark and the air conditioner ticks in the wall. Houston sleeps. You are standing in his kitchen in his bare feet with his heart going hard and young under his ribs, and you have just done the thing you came back to do: you have opened the page. The wheel sits there lit and patient. Tanner is five-five and thick through the shoulders, and he can't reach the top shelf. You tried it a minute ago, stretching with his fingertips on a box of cereal he wanted for no reason, and the box stayed where it was. That is part of it. The larger part is that you looked down at his big, quick, unlined hands and felt nothing, a body with no weather in it. You wanted someone with a morning on him. You pay. You spin. The wheel clicks down its teeth.

Flour.

You are standing at a bench with your weight on the left leg and the right one bouncing, heel up and down against the floor, a rhythm you did not start. Your hands are in dough. The lamp is hot on your neck. Outside the glass it is blue, the hour before anything, and one traffic light hangs red over an empty street with a dark diner beyond it. You were halfway through a motion and now you are finishing it, and the finishing is wrong. The dough tears a little under the heel of your palm. You stop, and do it again slowly. Tuck, turn, seal. It is right. Then the next loaf, and you check it. The next, and you check it. Ten of them, each one looked at, on a job these hands could do asleep.

The apron is stiff at the chest. It smells of old yeast and scorch, and it has a weight, a canvas hand laid flat against you. Something comes up through it, not yours. A June, a loan officer's office, a man who has put the bakery's apron on a hook and is signing for the first time as someone with something to lose. Pride sits in the chest like a swallowed coal. Then it's gone.

The sleeves are rolled twice. You feel his thumb remember the roll: the left, then the right, always the left first, at the door, in the dark, with the key still in his teeth. The shirt is soft with washing. The collar rubs the edge of his beard. He bought it secondhand from a man who died, and he never minded, and he thinks of that man's wife every time he buttons it.

Your hand drifts to the bench's edge, and the wood is worn into a shallow dish where his forearm goes. He leaned here at twenty-two, in his first month, crying quietly because the owner had shouted about a burned batch. Then years of it, the long happy grind of being good at one thing. There is a back room where he sleeps on his lunch break, and a woman who used to come in at six for rye and who stopped coming, and he never learned why, and it sits in him like a stone in a shoe.

Your cheek feels the tin of dip against his lip, the sting, the tobacco sweetness behind the gum. Your knees ache the dull ache of a man who stands for a living. Your back is strong. One eye drifts when you are tired, and you can feel it drift now, a soft slide outward, the world slightly doubled at the edge. He has never once been bothered by it. He is twenty-eight and has a little money put away, and nobody to spend it on, and he is all right with that, mostly.

You lift your hands from the dough. They are white to the wrist, creased with flour, hard along the pads. Yours. You turn them over, and the leg keeps bouncing.

You look up at the red light across the street and say, quietly, to nobody, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."