Patrick Dolan Brennan

You have been Josué Armando Peralta for two minutes, and already you know what is wrong with him. He is too clean. Janitor's hands, and nothing in them you want. You stand in the stairwell of a building in Honolulu with a mop bucket gone cold at your feet and the night nearly over, and the rubber handle in your fist gives you his mother's kitchen, a radio, a floor she waxed on her knees. It is sweet. It is not yours. It does not hold you. You paid for something that would hold you, and you got a man who is a little sad and a little hungry and very good at being tired. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and your thumb knows the way.

The wheel turns, and there is no travel in it.

Cold. Breath goes out of you white and you are already moving, the gravel of the canal path crunching under a stride that is not yours and is now. Mid-step. Your left foot is coming down and the ground is not where you expected it, so you stumble, and the stumble never lands, and the other foot takes the weight and the running goes on. Arms lower. Head still. Something buzzes against your wrist, a split, a number, a mile you never ran.

Earbuds. A voice in them mid-sentence, a man counting out a pace. You let it talk.

The fleece is the first thing that tells you anything. Zipped to the throat, it holds the heat of him, and the collar rubs under your jaw where the stubble is. Then you get it: a hook by a front door, a rowhouse hallway, a woman's voice from upstairs saying *take the good gloves*. He did not take the good gloves. He pulled this fleece off the hook in the dark so as not to wake her, and he put his arms in one at a time, the left sleeve first because the left shoulder is the stiff one. He stood on the marble step, worn hollow, and the first light was coming down the block, and he thought, plainly, *thank God I don't have to want a drink this morning.* It is a full thought. It has years under it.

Your lungs are good. Thirty years old and good, a little hard at the top of the breath. The legs are short and strong and they know the path without you. Calves tight. A blister forming at the back of the right heel, an old complaint, a sock he should have changed. The shoes slap gravel. Under the shoes, the memory of the same stones in summer, and her running beside him one August, laughing, quitting at mile two, and him walking back with her anyway. He loved that. He loved being the one who was walked back with.

The watch is on your left wrist, and when you swing the arm the strap bites. It gives you the garage: two bays, a car up on the lift, the cold of the concrete coming through his knees, a rag in the back pocket, a customer's brake line bent wrong by some other shop. His hands know the torque of a lug nut without a wrench. They are hands that fix what someone else got wrong. He is proud of that, quietly, the way he is proud of most things. Behind it, further back, a church basement, folding chairs, bad coffee, a number of days he counts the way other men count money. He decided. Nobody made him. You feel the decision sitting in his chest like a stone he carries on purpose.

The path bends. The lamp ahead is going pale against the sky. The freckles on your cheeks tighten in the cold, and you can feel them as a weather on the skin, a thing he has been teased for since he was six.

Nobody is here. Water on your left, dark and still. You slow, and the slowing is yours, and you lift your right hand in front of your face. Red knuckles, a nick across the base of the thumb, grease worked so deep into the creases it will never wash out. You turn it over. You open it and close it. It does what you tell it.

You look up. Steam leaves you in the cold.

"Okay," you say, and it comes out in his voice, a little roughened. "Okay. You." Then, lower: "How long do I get you?"

The watch buzzes again against your wrist, asking for the next mile.