Russell Dunmore

You are standing in a rented gym bathroom mirror, twenty-two years old, watching Nathan Prilosky's face do nothing you asked it to do. You made him hold a plank for ninety seconds this morning just to feel the burn arrive in a body you didn't grow, and it wasn't enough, it's never enough after the first minute of anybody — the newness goes out of a face fast when it's small and soft and has ninety more years of being small and soft ahead of it. You have been him sixty seconds. You are already gone from him. His phone is buzzing with a client cancellation and you don't care, you were never going to care, you took him to feel twenty-two and found out twenty-two feels like waiting. Your thumb is already on the site before you've decided anything, which is its own kind of answer.

You spin.

There is a lurch that isn't falling, and then rain, real rain, cold and needling on your face, on a face turned up and up into it, hood shoved back, and you are big now — that's the first thing, breadth in the shoulders where a second ago there was none, weight low in a gut and thighs that mean business, water running down a nose that isn't yours through a brow that is one continuous dark line over both eyes. Your bus board still reads 3 MIN behind you. Your — his — legs are planted in runoff up over the boot tops. Somewhere a chest is not shivering, though it's cold enough to.

The denim jacket is the first thing that talks. Wet through at the shoulders, it says *garage sale, four dollars, Linda laughed*, and there she is — not a name yet, just a laugh, a kitchen, a version of thirty years ago — before it resolves into Linda Dunmore setting a coffee down in front of you on a countertop that doesn't exist anymore because the house doesn't either, not to you. The hoodie under it: your son Danny's, left in a duffel bag two Christmases back, too small for you now the way boys leave things behind sized to who they used to think their father was. You never gave it back because giving it back would mean calling.

The jeans — bought at the outlet in Zanesville with a coupon Linda mailed you two years after the divorce, an ordinary kindness she never explained, and you never asked, because asking would have made it into something and it was easier as nothing.

The boots know a loading dock in the dark, six a.m., the particular give of concrete through worn Vibram soles, forty years of knowing exactly how far a knee will bend before it complains. There's an ache in both of them right now, low-grade, permanent as weather. The right one clicks on the second step, every day, first thing, like a bone saying good morning.

Bare ring finger — no ring, hasn't been one in eleven years, but the finger doesn't know that, the pale stripe of untanned skin sits there like a stalled clock, and touching it (you're touching it, his thumb worrying the base of it out of habit that isn't yours but arrives anyway) brings up a wedding in a backyard, folding chairs, his mother crying good tears, Linda's dress catching on a nail in the fence and both of them laughing so hard the vows started late.

You didn't do anything wrong, is the thing that comes through clearest, riding in on nothing you're touching, just sitting in the marrow of him like sediment. Nobody did anything wrong. It went quiet between them over about a decade and then it was just quiet, and the kids grew up fine anyway, better than fine, and he drives a van now for a company two towns over and it's fine, and he waits for a bus because his knee doesn't want the drive anymore some mornings, and it's all — fine. That word sits in him like a stone he's carried so long he's stopped feeling the weight, only the shape.

The rain keeps coming into his upturned face and some part of him — some last unerased inch of Russell Dunmore, going under — has stopped flinching from it a long time before this morning. Under your palms, at your sides, one leg has already started, without you, without him, the bounce it always does, a tremor at idle, sixty-three years old and still burning off something it never got to spend.

You look down at the hand doing it. Thick fingers, a farmer's tan without a farm, black hair dyed with more evenness than sixty-three years usually allows, the funeral-home neatness of a man still trying, quietly, for somebody who stopped looking.

You lift your eyes to whatever's in front of you — an empty street, one stoplight cycling to red for no one, a diner with its lights off — and say it out loud, in his voice, testing the register of it like a man checking a borrowed coat for fit:

"Well, hell."

The bounce in the leg doesn't stop. Neither does the rain. You don't know yet if that's a day you're staying for.