Russell Danaher

You are standing in Colby Haskins's kitchen in the middle of the night, and his lazy eye keeps drifting toward the refrigerator light while the other one tries to read the clock on the stove. Four minutes. He is twenty-two and his beard comes in patchy under your thumb, and the store keys are on the counter where he dropped them. You hold them and get nothing, a jingle, a manager's tired pride you didn't ask for. It is not that he is bad. It is that he is a boy who is already a little afraid of being found out, and you can feel it in the shoulders, and you have been in that fear for four minutes and cannot stand another. So you open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb, and you let it.

The sidewalk arrives under you mid-step, and you have stopped. Humid night air, a hedge, a streetlight buzzing overhead. A plastic handle sits in your right hand, and at the far end of the cord a small gray dog is nosing leaves. Your left hand is in a pocket. Your leg is bouncing, already, on its own.

Then the dog lifts his head past the hedge and looks at you with his ears flat back. The cord goes slack.

The zip of the jacket is cold against your throat, and it opens something. Evening, a closet, his hand taking the navy jacket off a hook because the night is cooler than it looks. Before it, the gray t-shirt, soft from years of washing, pulled on over a head of thinning hair he doesn't think about anymore. The lanyard he tosses on the dresser after a shift. His knees on the stairs; he counts them lately. The dog's name comes up warm and sideways: Biscuit, a rescue, picked because he was ugly and nobody wanted him, and a girlfriend laughing in a doorway, saying he's just like you.

The handle is slick under your palm and it gives you a daughter. Not a face, only a weight: a small hand once on this same cord, a Saturday, a pride he carries like a coin in his pocket. Then a woman from long ago whose name he does not say aloud, a porch light, a thing left unfinished that still has an ache in it. Pocket lint under your fingers. A rosary's worth of Sunday pews, kneeling, the bad knee complaining. He has never had a drink and he is fine with it; the fact is a clean floor in him.

His jaw is smooth, shaved this morning. The chin cleft catches your thumb when you rub it. Six foot two, long in the back, a little ache low down at the spine, strong thighs from the walking. Hours of headset have left a sore place above the ear. His leg won't stop.

You wind the cord twice around your hand and the dog's whole body notices.

You turn your hand over under the streetlight. Lined, steady, plainly someone's. You look up, past it.

"Come on, Biscuit," you say. "Let's see how far this goes."

The dog doesn't move. Neither of you knows how long this will last.