Roger Kesselman

The tow truck cab still smells like coffee gone cold in the cupholder, and your hands — his hands, Boston hands, knuckles thick as walnuts — are wrapped around a steering wheel you have no destination for. It's a Monday night and the hook job canceled twenty minutes ago, some kid's Civic that got itself unstuck without you, and now there's nothing but the dashboard light and the radio turned low and a feeling that has nothing to do with him at all. This body is fine. It works. It breathes, it lifts, it will live another twenty years if it watches the salt and the cholesterol. But you didn't come back here for him. You came back because the wanting came back, the itch that has nothing to do with any single life and everything to do with the number — four hundred and seventeen, and sitting still on it feels like leaving a coat on the floor instead of hanging it up. You take out the phone. The site loads the way it always loads, patient, gray, a wheel drawn plain as a raffle board. You pay. You spin. You do not say goodbye to the man whose hands are doing this, because you were never in the habit of it, and the wheel does not wait for that either.

The brush is already between two fingers, load-bearing, the way you'd hold a pen you'd forgotten you were holding. There is tape along a baseboard, blue and exact, and a smell of latex and cut grass drifting through a window somebody left cracked despite the heat outside. Your knee is down on a drop cloth. His weight — heavy, low in the belly, a weight that has learned exactly how far it can lean before the knee complains — is yours now, all at once, no seam to it. The stroke you're mid-way through goes crooked, a half-inch overrun onto the wall above the trim, and you stop. Correct it. Do the next one slow, watching the bristle meet the tape line like you've never done this before in your life. Ten more come out the same way — checked, deliberate, a rhythm forty years old suddenly walked like a tightrope.

The overalls are what open first. Canvas gone soft as flannel from a thousand washes, straps worn shiny at the buckles, and there's a whole morning sitting in the weave of them — him standing in a bedroom with the shades still down, buckling the left strap first because the right one's clip is bent and catches on the denim if he does it out of order, a habit so old it isn't a decision anymore. He'd stood in front of the mirror a half-second longer than usual today, thumb finding the notch in his chin the way it does sometimes without him noticing, and thought about nothing, or thought about her, which by now amounts to the same nothing. Sherry. Gone four months. Not a fight so much as a slow leak — she'd wanted him to sell the house in Marietta and he'd wanted to keep painting other people's rooms instead of dealing with his own, and somewhere in there she'd stopped waiting for him to notice the difference. His daughter still calls on Sundays. That's the one thing that still has a shape to it, a voice on a phone saying *Dad* in a tone that means she still believes in him a little.

The brush handle gives you his trade — twenty-six years of it, hands that know how to cut a line without tape at all but tape it anyway because the last guy who skipped it lost the account. The floor under your knee gives you the cold of a hundred empty rooms in July, air conditioning not run yet because the crew doesn't get here till the walls are ready for it. Your back, against nothing right now but should be against a stepladder later, remembers bending over baseboards until it locks up if he doesn't stretch first, and there's a story in that, the disc that never quite healed right, the extra pill that goes with the metformin now, quiet arithmetic he does every morning without complaint. Your mouth remembers a cigarette he hasn't had in six years and still sometimes reaches for out of nothing, the ghost of it in his back pocket where a pack used to ride. Under it all, low and constant, is the body's own weather — the thirst that's a little too present, the fatigue behind the knees, sugar doing what sugar does, managed and not fixed, never fixed. His hands, when there's no brush in them, go to his mouth. You feel the old bitten edge of a thumbnail catch on your lip before you've told it to.

You sit back on your heel. Look down. The hand is broad, cracked at two knuckles, a fleck of yellow ochre dried into the crease by the thumb like it's always been there. You turn it over once, like checking it's real, like checking it's yours, and lift your eyes off it — past the taped window, into whatever is watching.

"Sherry, if you're seeing this," you say, in his voice, not knowing whose sentence it is, "tell Katie I finished the Delacroix job."