Paul Hendricks

You are Gary Dunleavy, and your thumbs are black to the first knuckle. You have been him for under a minute, and already the garage is wrong. The radio plays the station he'd have picked. Your knees ache at the creeper. Sixty-five years of a body that works, and what you are thinking about is the man in Denver who sat across a table from Ernesto Maldonado an hour ago, when you were Ernesto, and said *we'll circle back* in a voice that wanted something.

That is not why you are leaving. You tell yourself it is. The truth is smaller. Gary's wife's name is on the lock screen of his phone, and the phone has buzzed twice, and you have not looked. Something in the buzzing is a life you'd have to answer for. The wheel never buzzes at you. You wipe your hands on a rag and press the button.

Then the rag is paper. A fold of it, edges soft, between your fingers, and the sun is on your face like a hand. You are standing on stone steps with your weight on one leg, and the leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. Heat comes off the sandstone wall, and a brown leather case hangs open against your belly. Mountains sit pale behind the roofs. You were mid-motion and you still are.

Your thumb finds a legal pad's edge, and the first thing comes up through it: a Sunday, a church basement, folding chairs, coffee that tasted of the urn. Paul stood at the back with his arms crossed because he had stopped drinking eleven days before and did not trust his hands near a cup. The leg bounced then too. A woman he would not name sang in the second row, and the wanting in it was not yours. It was older and it sat under his ribs.

The sleeves come next. They are rolled twice, forearm to elbow, and the cotton is warm. Through them comes the morning: a bathroom mirror, the long gray hair combed back wet with his fingers, the beard trimmed with scissors because the clippers broke in March. He put the vest on first, standing, buttons fumbled. The jacket hung on the door. He rolled the sleeves at the last, deliberately, so the ink showed. He never explained it to clients. *C.A.M. 1982.* Under the cloth your arm remembers a needle and a boy of sixteen, a summer, a girl's initials. The ex who still matters. He drove past her street last week. He did not turn.

The watch is cold against your wrist bone. It was his father's, and with it comes a smell of cigarettes and a rule he keeps: only when he drinks, and he has not been drinking, and the want arrives anyway at the courthouse doors. The body is heavy and honest. His back aches low on the left. His belly rests on the belt, and his breath comes short on the stairs. The mole on his cheek itches in the sun.

You look at your hands. They are thick and steady. They know the case's latch without you. You turn them over. Ernesto had hands like this, once, for an hour.

You look up, and say, quietly, "Well. Hello, Paul."

The leg keeps bouncing. You do not know how long you have him.