Raymond Duckworth

The welding gloves are still warm on Colton's hands when you set them down for the last time.

Eighteen, heavy through the shoulders, dark hair stuck to his forehead with sweat that isn't yours and never was. He's been you for less than a minute and already you know the whole shape of the problem: the shift ends in four hours, the foreman hates him, and the girl who doesn't love him back is texting him from a number he still hasn't deleted. None of it is unbearable. That's the trouble with it. You've had seventy-six men and this one is fine, this one is young and strong and going to have a decent enough life, and you are standing in his boots at the end of a double shift feeling nothing so much as the specific boredom of a body with no story left to give you tonight. So you go back to the site on his phone, in the break room, the wheel already loading before the door's shut behind you.

You spin because you always spin. That's closer to the true answer than any reason you'd say out loud.

—

The scroll goes fast under your thumb, faster than it was a half-second ago, and the light of somebody else's phone is on somebody else's cheek.

You're lying on your side. Fifty-nine years of shoulder and hip settled into a mattress that knows this exact weight, a body narrower than the one you left, lighter, tireder in a way that isn't sleep — a low hum of fatigue sitting behind the sternum like a held breath, because that's what it is, some. The thumb keeps moving without you, muscle doing what muscle does, flicking past a headline, a photo of a grandchild that isn't his, an ad for a mattress. Outside the window, sirens two streets over, wet light. It's late here. It was already evening where you came from and it is deep in its own evening here too, but this man's evening runs backward from the rest of the world's — you can feel it in the low simmer under the tiredness, a body trained for two in the morning, resentful of eleven at night the way a night-shift man's body always is.

The T-shirt is the first thing that talks. Gray, thin at the collar, and touching it gives you the smell of a laundromat on Nostrand Avenue and the particular ache of feet that have stood in a train corridor for six hours at a stretch. Raymond Duckworth. The name comes up out of the shirt like a tag sewn into the seam.

The corridor arrives whole: dim blue emergency lighting, the rock of the carriage, a name tag pinned crooked because he pins it crooked every night, thirty years of it, turndown service and bad coffee and men who tip and men who don't. He likes the ones who don't sleep, the talkers, the man once who told him about his dead wife for four hours between Albany and nowhere and then thanked him at the door like Raymond had done something holy. He had liked that. He still thinks about that man sometimes, on the bad nights, the ones where the apnea machine sits on his nightstand mocking him because he's given up wearing it, because Diane used to make him wear it and Diane isn't here to make him do anything anymore.

Diane. The tan line on the ring finger burns cold suddenly, phantom-cold, a specific absence in the shape of a wedding band, and it drags up a kitchen in Bay Ridge, her back to him at the stove, the two of them fighting without raising their voices because that's how they fought, twenty-six years of low and reasonable and dying anyway. Their son at the table not looking up from his homework, already an expert at not looking up. The finger remembers the weight of the ring more than it remembers taking it off.

The mattress under this hip — his hip — is a rental mattress in an apartment he's had four years and still calls the new place. His back doesn't hurt exactly, but it announces itself, fifty-nine years of standing announcing itself, and there is a leg, his left, already going under the sheet, bouncing at the knee the way it bounces at gate stations and church pews and everywhere else nobody's watching, a motor that runs whether he wants it to or not.

He believes in God without making a show of it, prays quick and plain before the first train call of the week, and somewhere in that same fold of him is Sunday mornings alone now, a pew with room enough for two and only one of him in it.

The last flash comes off the phone itself, still warm from his palm before you took the palm too — this morning, hours ago in his time, buttoning the white shirt, tucking it, the necktie's familiar drag around a throat that's gotten looser than it used to be, and the particular satisfaction of a man who still puts on the uniform like it means something, because to him it still does.

You look at your hands. Older hands than you've worn all week, spotted faintly at the knuckle, the ghost-pale band still there on the ring finger like a brand nobody else can see. You turn the right one over slow, watching it in the phone's blue light, and something in Raymond's chest — no, in yours now, on loan — goes quiet and strange, the way a house does when somebody's just left the room.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the ceiling, and put the phone down face-first on the comforter.