Sean Mulhearn

You are sitting in Darnell Overton's shop, behind the glass counter, and the ring tray in front of you has been wrong for an hour. Forty-three years in this body and under a minute of them yours. His knees are fine. His beard is neat. A man has come in with a trombone, and you have been counting the fingerprints on the glass instead of listening to what he wants for it. Darnell is good at this. He reads a face and prices it in a breath. You can feel the knowledge sitting in him like change in a pocket, and you do not want it. You want to be a man who does not know what anything is worth. Something went flat on the way out of the last one, a small thing, a sound you could not place, and now every minute in here tastes the same. You push the trombone back across the counter. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Brown cotton against your back, warm, a box in both hands, the edge of it biting your palms. Sun on your neck. You are standing on a steel step with one boot on the grille and the other on the street, halfway through a lift, and your body knows the lift. The box is light, maybe ten pounds, and you set it down on the shelf.

It goes wrong. Your hand misses the shelf edge by an inch. You lift the box again, slowly, and set it down correctly. The next one you check, turning the label toward you, and the one after.

The shirt first. It is thin at the collar from a hundred washes, and the memory comes in his feeling: this morning, the dark kitchen, a woman asleep upstairs, a child's cereal bowl in the sink. He buttons from the bottom, because he always does, and the top button last, then leaves it open. The shorts are stiff. The little scanner on your hip knocks against your leg like a second pulse, and the plastic of it gives you a name: Dana, saying *you're back by six, right?* He said yes. Underneath the yes sits a number he does not say aloud, the one on the envelope in the kitchen drawer, the one that keeps growing. It is a quiet weight in his chest, thinner than shame and heavier than worry.

The boots. Under your toes the leather has gone soft where his right foot turns out. They carry the shape of every stoop he has climbed, and with it comes a church basement, folding chairs, bad coffee he did not drink, a hand on his shoulder. Sober, by decision. Three years in March. The decision is still in the muscle, a clench behind the jaw at the smell of someone's beer on a porch.

You touch the cardboard and get the street: marble steps worn hollow, the first sun coming down the block, a dog that knows his truck. You taste the stubble on your lip with your tongue. Your shoulders ache pleasantly. Your lower back remembers every box since seven. Thirty-one years old, a body that still forgives him. The freckles on your nose are warm in the light, and you can feel the sun on them.

A small shoe, a sticker on the dashboard, a laugh in the back seat. He loves one person here without any doubt. That part comes through the strap of the scanner and nearly drops you.

You look at your hands. They are broad across the knuckles, scuffed at the thumbs, steady. Not Darnell's hands. Not anyone's you have worn. You turn them over, then raise your eyes to the open street.

"Well," you say, in a voice with Philadelphia in it. "Hello."

Somewhere behind the sun the wheel is already waiting, and you do not know whether this man will last until lunch.