Terrence Aucoin

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Marcus Delfino's apartment smells like burnt coffee and the delivery bag he never washes out, and you have been him for four days and twenty-two hours, which is long enough to know the whole shape of a life you didn't want. Twenty-nine dollars an hour if you're lucky, less if you're not, a knee that clicks on the stairs though he's thirty-four, a phone that buzzes with an ex-girlfriend's name he still hasn't blocked. It's fine. It was never going to be more than fine. You stand in his kitchen at noon, holding his phone, and the boredom isn't dramatic, it's just there, the way a room is there, and underneath it is the plain fact that you paid for the spin and you didn't pay to stay still. You open the site on his phone with his thumb. The wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, which is its own kind of honesty.

The leash goes slack in your hand.

You feel it before you feel anything else — the give of it, a small mechanical stop, and a dog's ears going back at whatever just crossed behind a man's eyes. Your knees are not the knees you had a second ago. There's a soreness in the left one, old and familiar to somebody, unfamiliar to you, and a looseness in the gut you recognize from bodies that have had fifty-some years to settle into themselves. Your hand — his hand — winds the leash twice without being told to, some old habit finishing the motion before you've caught up to owning it. The dog, gold-colored, patient, looks up at a face that is technically still doing the same thing it was doing a second ago, and doesn't know the difference. You start walking. The dog has to catch the new rhythm of it, a half-step behind.

Morning light, wet street, a smell of somebody's coffee two houses down and, underneath, the flat mineral smell of a city that is mostly water pretending to be land. New Orleans. You know it the way you know a word before you know its definition — the air tells you before anything else does.

Then the leash strap under your palm gives you the first flash: a hand — his hand, the one you're wearing — clipping this same leash onto this same collar an hour ago, in a hallway with a window unit rattling, the dog already turning circles at the door. Retired greyhound of a golden, not a greyhound at all, just old the way retrievers get old, slow to rise, patient about it. Comes with the walk twice a day whether he's slept or not, and this morning he hasn't slept, not really — he came off shift at five, sat in the driveway a while with the engine off because sitting in the dark with your own breathing is sometimes the only ten minutes you get, and then he came in, and Denise was already up doing the thing she does with her coffee where she doesn't say anything, just puts a mug down near your elbow like a peace treaty neither of you signed onto in words. Thirty-one years married. You get flashes of decades in the time it takes the dog to sniff a hedge — a wedding in a church with too much air conditioning, three kids loud in a kitchen that used to be a different kitchen, a fourth grandchild's photo taped inside a visor. A woman named Angela before Denise, a girlfriend at nineteen who he still, God help him, thinks about sometimes when a particular kind of rain falls, though he'd never say her name out loud in his own house.

The zip of the jacket against your chest brings the morning back sleeve by sleeve — hands numb with fatigue pulling a brown fleece off a hook by the door because the house was cold in the way houses get cold in New Orleans in February, which is not cold at all to anyone else, and everything under it: the shirt he buttoned three-quarters through before giving up on the top button the way he has for twenty years, the jeans that already knew the shape of his legs before he put them on this morning, the sneakers he bought because his daughter told him to stop wearing the ones that hurt his arches. Fifty-seven years in this frame and you can feel all of it at once — a lower back that announces itself getting out of the car, a grip in the right hand still strong from a decade behind a wheel handing luggage in and out of trunks, gray in a beard he keeps short because Denise likes it short, a wedding band worn thin and smooth from three decades of not taking it off. Night driver. Days and nights inverted so long his body doesn't argue about it anymore, which is why an ordinary Thursday morning finds him upright and moving instead of asleep — the shift ended, the dog needed out, and sleep can wait the way it always waits.

You feel, distinct from any of it, the specific tiredness of a man who has spent the night ferrying strangers through a city that never quite goes to sleep either, tired in the shoulders and the eyes, tired in a way a nap won't touch, and still doing this, walking a dog down a wet sidewalk in the sun because it needs doing and nobody else in the house is up yet.

You stop. Look down at the hand holding the leash — his hand, spotted faintly at the knuckle, the ring catching the light — and turn it over like it's something you found.

You look up, past the hedge, into the ordinary brightness of a street that isn't yours, and say, out loud, to no one, "Okay."

The dog, unbothered, keeps walking, and so, for now, do you.