Russell Tuttle

You are Dale Whitaker, and you have been him for less than a minute, and already you know the knees are wrong. Fifty-nine years of them. The bathroom tile in Nashville is cold through your socks, the window over the sink is still dark, and your thumb is on the screen of a phone that is not yours either. The wheel is turning. You are not tired of him. You only found out, standing here, that he cannot do the thing you wanted. The wanting came up through the floor before the coffee did. You wanted to feel your own weight go easily through a doorway, and Dale's weight will not. You press the button.

Then there is no bathroom. There is heavy air, wet as a hand over your mouth, and gray light in the trees, and you are standing in dirt with your weight on your left leg and your right knee going up and down, up and down, on its own. A roll of drawings is crushed in your fists. Steel stands behind you, a frame with nothing on it yet. A hard hat sits snug on a scalp you can feel the air on.

Your hand has just done something wrong. You felt it, a half-second stumble in a motion the body has made ten thousand times. You make the motion again, slowly, correctly. Then again. Ten times, each one checked, on a job that has not needed checking in years. He would never have known why.

The vest is first. Mesh, damp, cutting a little under the arms. It gives you a kitchen with a light over the stove, a woman's voice behind him saying *you've got your vest?* and his own voice saying *I've got it*, and the vest hanging on the same chair as every morning. Love, plain as a worn handle.

The henley is next, the cloth gone soft and thin at the wrists. Three buttons, he left the top one open. His thumb remembers pushing the sleeves up past the elbow in the truck, the old cuff stained gray. He dressed in the dark so he would not wake the girls, one boot on the stair, one in his hand. He prayed in the driveway, engine off, forehead almost touching the wheel. *Keep my hands careful. Bring everybody home.* It was not a request. It was a habit.

The paper in your fists remembers a long summer, a boy who fell off a deck on another job, and a promise made afterward in a hospital hallway. That is why he checks. You didn't know a man could hold a fear for years and call it diligence.

The wedding ring is a small pressure on the left hand, thin from years of wear. Your thumb turns it once. A woman laughs in a church parking lot. There is another girl, long ago, and his chest still goes quiet around her name, though he never says it. Two children are asleep somewhere in a cul-de-sac, behind a house he is paying off.

The gut sits heavy and solid over the belt. His shoulders ache with a hard, honest ache. His leg will not stop bouncing, and you let it.

You turn your right hand over. The moustache is stiff against your lip. You lift your eyes.

"Well," you say, in a voice that rasps and settles low in your chest. "Morning."

Behind you the steel is waiting. You wonder how long this one lasts, whether you will still be him when the sun clears the trees, and whether the wanting will wake before the coffee does.