Paul Medeiros

You were the delivery driver for less than a minute, and already you know what's wrong with him. Philadelphia, a Tuesday before the light, and the bald scalp under your palm is a stubble of someone else's habit. Freckled forearms on a steering wheel that isn't yet moving. Forty-nine, hazel-eyed, athletic, a body that works, and none of it is the trouble. The trouble is that you sat in the parked van with the engine ticking and found you had nothing to want. Every route was already in his legs. You pay, you spin, and the wheel clicks past its pegs.

You are mid-stride.

Cold goes into your lungs first, then the sound of your own breath, which you can see. Gravel under both feet. Your left foot is going down and you catch it, a stumble that never lands, and the right takes the weight, and you are running. Arms low. Head still. A buzz on your left wrist: a split, a number you never held.

Earbuds. Something with a drum in it. A canal on your left, flat and pewter, steaming faintly. A belly that rolls a half-beat behind the rest of you, and under it a heart that is working harder than he'd admit. Your right leg wants to bounce even while it runs, a tremor in the knee that has nothing to do with the pace.

The zipper pull of the fleece taps your breastbone, and it opens a door. His hands, not yours, pulling it up in the dark of a kitchen, a small voice from the stairs: *Daddy, are you going already?* The youngest, sock feet on the third step. He crouched and let her put her cold fingers in his beard, because she liked to count the gray ones at the chin. Four, she said, always four, though there were more.

The watch gives you the next one. He bought it the winter the business cleared its first good year, and he stood in the shop afraid it was vanity. Sawdust still in the cuffs of his shirt. He kept it anyway.

The ring on your left hand turns against the knuckle as you swing your arm. Marriage comes up whole: a wife asleep on her side, the mattress tilted toward her, and him lying still so as not to wake her. Three kids. A triple-decker with a porch where he stands in the evenings with a vape, thinking he's hiding it. He smokes too, a few, behind the truck. He has never taken a drink in his life. The reason is a man at a funeral, and it stays shut.

Under the soles, the path. Frost crunches. Every site he has framed lives in the thighs now: the stairs, the lifting, the knee that complains going down. His head is sure of one thing, Mass on Sunday, the back pew, the kids fidgeting, his leg going the whole hour.

You slow, and the gravel slows with you. Your breath smokes upward through the long beard.

You lift your hands. Thick fingers, a gold band, grit in the creases. You turn them over.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is low and rough. "Okay. Hello."

The watch buzzes again. Your leg keeps bouncing, though you have stopped. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be here when the light finally reaches the water.