Samir Haddad

You are Raymond Choi, and you are standing in a stairwell with a level in your hand, and you have already decided.

It is nothing he did. Raymond is fifty-five and his knees tell him so on every riser, and the silver in his hair is something you've stopped noticing in glass. The scar through his eyebrow itches when the drywall dust comes up. He is fine. He is a body that works. But you spent the morning measuring a doorway for a man who kept saying "you know what I mean," and you did not, and you stood there in a skinny frame with a pencil behind a borrowed ear and felt the wanting come back like a tooth. Not boredom exactly. Something unsaid. You set the level on the sawhorse gently, as if it might be missed, and open the page with the wheel on it.

It turns. You pay. You are Raymond for less than a minute more.

Then a tinny song loops back to its first bar, and your shoulder lets go of a phone.

It drops into your hand mid-loop. The pen stops on the second digit of a number and does not start again. The kitchen is bright and gray with autumn through the window, and the floor is warm under bare feet. You are standing at a counter, leaning, weight on one hip. You are taller than Raymond by an inch, and wider through the chest, and the breath goes down further.

The henley first. Cotton, soft from washing, sleeves shoved to the elbow and one of them already slipping. Touching the placket brings the morning: his thumb and finger on those three buttons in the dark of the bedroom, leaving the top one open because she liked it that way, a woman's voice from the bed saying something about the gutter man. The jeans are stiff at the knee. In the pocket there's a folded paper, and when your fingers close on it you get a truck cab, a thermos, a boy's drawing taped to the dash, the warm stupid pride of it.

The envelope under your left hand. The ring on that hand is a plain band, a little loose in the cold, and turning it with your thumb gives you a porch, a storm door banging, a hand on his sleeve in the rain, a yes said badly because his voice cracked. He laughed at himself. She did too. It goes through your chest like a swallowed coal.

The counter edge is cool and worn smooth. Under it, a different year: a woman with her hair up, laughing on some other stairs, a sentence he never finished, a feeling that sits low and quiet like a stone in a coat. Nobody knows about it. You feel him put it away again, even now, even with nothing of him left to do the putting.

His knuckles want cracking. Your fingers do it before you decide, a pop like a dry branch, and the relief runs up the forearm. His hands know the pen, know the weight of a framing hammer, know how to lie flat on a board. His back has a low ache from lifting. The money worry is there too, a number that never gets bigger, folded small.

The phone says, in a bright voice, that your call is important.

You look at your hand. You turn it over. The knuckles are broad and scarred in no way you can find, and the ring catches the window.

You look up. "Sorry," you say, low, in a voice that is not yet yours. "I think I lost my place."

The song loops again. You don't know how long this lasts, or when the wanting comes back, or whether you are still him by the time the afternoon turns dark.