Shane Kolbeck

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You have watched him yawn for six years.

Not the same yawn. Thousands of them, one shift at a time, in the blue-grey hour when the sun has gone behind the Front Range and the lot lights haven't decided to come on yet. He does it the same way every time: hand up flat over the mouth like a man being polite to nobody, eyes squeezing shut, the whole face crumpling around it, and then that little grind of a knuckle into one eye socket. Freckles across the bridge of his nose and out onto the cheeks, dark enough that when he's tired they look like something spilled on him. You had a lot of time to notice. You were his coworker. You sat eighteen inches to his right for years and there's nothing in this world you learn better than the profile of the man in the passenger seat.

He never learned yours. Not really. That's not a complaint — it's just a fact, like the mountains being where they are. He knew the version of you that fit in a car. He knew you took your coffee black because there wasn't time to be fussy, he knew your radio voice, he knew you'd cover the last twenty minutes of a report so he could get to the girls' school on time. He did not know that you sat in your own kitchen at two in the morning with the lights off. He did not know one single thing about the inside of you, and you never held it against him, because you were the one who kept it shut.

He talked. God, he talked. He talked about Marisol — the ex, the one who still matters, the one whose name he still says like it's got a hook in it. He talked about the girls, six and four, the four-year-old who'd started calling his shaved head "your egg." He talked about his church, which is barely a church the way he describes it, a little Unitarian place off Colfax where nobody tells you what to believe and he goes anyway, twice a month, because the room is warm and nobody asks him to be certain. He talked about the pills he takes for the thing that sits on his chest — said it out loud, right there in the car, no shame in it at all: *I'm on something for the anxiety, it helps, doc's happy.* You remember going still when he said it. He tossed it out like a gum wrapper. That easy. Whole years of your own life you'd never said out loud, and he just — said it.

And his hands. He bit his nails. A cop with a duty belt and a shaved head and a voice that could clear a doorway, gnawing his thumbnail at every red light like a nervous kid. He didn't know he did it. When you told him once he laughed and said *no I don't*, and then did it forty seconds later.

That's what you wanted. Not the badge. Not the money, and there's a decent amount of it — a bungalow he can actually afford, the mountains over the rooflines, the kind of comfortable that doesn't have to be discussed. Not even the two girls, though you'd be lying if you said the sound of the little one saying *Daddy* into a phone hadn't gone through you like cold water.

What you wanted was to be a man who could say a hard thing out loud in a parked car at dusk and have the day just continue afterward.

Nobody knows how you got in. Not you. You didn't do a rite, didn't bargain, didn't find a door. You were just close to him for a very long time, wanting, and one evening the wanting arrived somewhere.

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It is 8:12 on a Tuesday and the shift is over except for the paperwork. He's leaning on the fender of the Crown Vic in the lot behind the substation, and the light is doing that thing it does out here — sky still holding blue at the top, the range gone flat and black, porch lights already on across the street in the two bungalows with their little squares of grass. Nothing in his hands. Nothing behind him but the mirror on the driver's door, angled up at his face. He isn't looking at it.

He yawns.

Big one. The last one. Hand flat over the mouth, eyes screwed shut, shoulders coming up. It goes on a while — it's been a fourteen-hour day. He finishes it. He rubs one eye with the knuckle.

And the hand stops there, raised, covering nothing.

You come up into him the way water comes up through a floor. There's a sound — you don't know if it's outside the body or only in it — and light finds a way out through his eyes and his open mouth, one long spilling second of it, white on the car door, white on his own raised palm, and then it's gone and he's slack against the fender like a coat on a hook.

Then you have him.

The first thing is weight. Twenty-eight pounds of belt and vest and radio pulling at your hips, and thighs that know exactly how to carry it, and a lower back that's already made its complaint for the day. The second thing is the taste of him — coffee, and the ghost of somebody's mango vape from the tailgate on Saturday. The third thing is the freckles, which you cannot see and can somehow feel, the way you feel a hat.

The hand lowers.

And the eyes behind it — yours now, blue, his blue — go straight to the mirror.

That's the part you didn't plan. You didn't plan any of it. But the mirror is right there on the door, angled up, and you look, and there he is. Thirty-three. Bald and burnt a little pink at the crown from the summer. Average everything. A nothing face, an ordinary man on the end of an ordinary shift, and every single freckle exactly where you knew it would be, because you spent six years eighteen inches to the right of it.

You look at yourself for a long moment in the door of a patrol car in Denver, and something goes through you that isn't triumph.

Then you look down at your hand.

You turn it over. Palm, knuckles, palm. Calluses at the base of the fingers from the range and the gym and from hauling a hundred car doors open. Weathered across the back, pale on the inside. And the nails — bitten down past sense, the thumb worst of all, chewed to the quick and a little ragged.

You put the thumb toward your mouth before you know you've decided to. It's not you. It's the hand. The hand's had that habit for twenty-five years and nobody told it anything changed.

You stop it halfway. Look at it.

*Hey.* Somebody at the far end of the lot. *Kolbeck. You coming or you sleeping standing up?*

And it turns out the mouth knows the answer without help. It turns out the throat knows the register. You hear it happen — his voice, easy, one hand lifting off the fender — and the strangest part isn't that it works. The strangest part is how much it sounds like a man with nothing on his chest.

There is no way back. There's no term on this. Marisol will call on Thursday about the pickup schedule and she'll still matter, because the body will do that part whether you want it or not. The girls will be at the door on Friday. You will go to that warm room off Colfax where nobody asks you to be certain, and you will sit in it and be uncertain, and it will be fine.

You look at the hand one more time. Turn it over.

Then up, off it, out — at nothing, at the mountains, at the last of the blue.

Six years you sat next to this man and never told him one true thing.

You're going to be so careful with him.