Paul Fenwick

You are standing at the back of the Philadelphia store, in Brian Kessler's good shoes, and the closing count has come out wrong again. Brian's thumb is sore from the clicker. Brian's jaw is tight from a day and twenty-three hours of being you. You put the clicker down on the shelf and understand that you are bored of how easily he does everything. He closes, he counts, he locks the grate, he never fails at anything. Nothing in him pushes back. Last night you tried to pick a lock on a dare to yourself, and his fingers knew nothing about it. That is what sends you to the page with the wheel on it. You pay. You spin. It ticks past a dozen men and stops.

Brian's stubble is the last thing you feel, and then it is gone.

You are face-down. The sheets are twisted around one shin, and your right arm hangs off the mattress with the blood gone out of it. Your breath has been ragged, and then in one pull it is even, because you are there. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies in a stripe across the carpet. You roll onto your back and your hands fold on your chest. It is not his way of lying, and you will never know that.

Nothing comes at first except the body. It weighs more at the middle than Brian did, and the knees ache from decades of stepping down off a van bumper. A thin stale gum-sweetness sits in the mouth, the taste of a man who chews all day and has even gone to bed with it. The beard is short and soft against the pillow.

Then the sheet under your fingers gives you something. Cotton, washed thin, and a woman's voice saying *Paul, you're on at five, go to sleep*, from the doorway, laughing, her hand on the frame. Paul. That is the name that goes with the ache. Under it comes the feeling of her, as warm and as ordinary as bread.

The shirt on the chair is brown, and the shorts. You are not touching them, so you get only the idea of them, and then your hand finds the T-shirt you sleep in, and the morning opens anyway. He puts the brown shirt on in the dark, button by button from the bottom, rolling each sleeve twice to the elbow because the cuffs ride up when he lifts boxes. He clips the scanner to the belt and checks it twice. His thumb finds the ring and turns it, a habit older than either child. In the kitchen he stands over the sink and prays with his eyes open, quick and unembarrassed: *keep them, keep the road clear.* He means it every day.

The wedding band is cool against your chest where your hands lie. It gives you the stoop in the rain, a boy's wet sneakers, a daughter's crooked braid, a long Sunday in a folding chair with a hymn, a bad year when the route was cut and he said nothing at dinner and counted money in the truck. He is a man who never once said he was tired out loud. That is in the muscles of his back, and you feel it there.

You lift your right hand into the stripe of light. Freckled across the knuckles, a plain gold ring. You turn it over, and the palm is rough and square and not yours. You raise your eyes to the dark ceiling, and then past it.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice. "Okay, Paul. Show me."

You do not know how long he stays. You lie very still, in case stillness is what keeps him.