Terrence Odell Banks

You are at the screen on a Friday afternoon with nothing on. Work is done and the scrolling has gone stale. You have read the threads at two in the morning for years: the swaps, the waking up in someone else, the one where the man looks at his hands. You have always wanted it and never had a way to get it. Now there is a page with a wheel on it, and you pay, and you spin, and you do not believe it.

Then you are standing on a sidewalk with a plastic handle in your right hand.

Gray sky, heavy air, cut grass. A hedge a foot from your shoulder, and at the end of a thin cord a small rough dog with its nose in the leaves. You were never walking and now you have stopped. The dog lifts its head past the hedge and looks at you with its ears flat back. The cord goes slack. You wind it twice around your fist, and your legs start moving at a stride the dog has to learn.

The hoodie is soft and heavy against your back, and the handle's rubber is warm. The memory comes up through your palm. It is his, not yours: a Saturday, a boy of six or seven, a bag from the pet store, and the dog a wet-eyed pup in a cardboard box. His wife said *we are not getting a dog*, and she was laughing. He carried the box in with both arms. What he felt was a plain, embarrassed happiness he would never say aloud.

The wedding band presses the next finger. Under it is a kitchen, years back, a woman at the sink with her back to him, and a long, careful quiet after an argument about money. He is ashamed, and he keeps on loving her. Under that, a different woman, much older in his mind, a porch light, a car pulling away. He is still carrying the one who got away, and he does not take her out. He folds her up and puts her back.

His jaw is tight. You find your teeth clenched and cannot make them stop. It is his habit, the thing his body does when he is not thinking. The jaw stays clenched, and behind it the memory of a church basement and folding chairs, a prayer said over bad coffee. He quit drinking there, in that room, without a speech. It was an ordinary Tuesday.

The hoodie opens something else. This morning, in a dark bedroom, he pulled it over his head and the sleeves caught at the wrist, a trick of the cuffs he knows. He stood a minute and listened to two children breathing through a wall. Then the extrusion line, the plastic spooling out, the earplugs in the pocket of the work shirt he took off an hour ago. The shoes are old canvas, flat under the heel, and his feet know how to land in them.

He is thin and long, and the knees ache in that dull way of forty-one. His shoulders are stronger than they look from hauling spools all week. His breath goes in easily. There is nothing in his account, under five thousand dollars, and the dog tugs, and you let it.

You lift your right hand and turn it over. The ring is plain, the palm creased and dry. You look up and say, out loud, in his low voice, "Okay, then. Let's go."

You walk. The question is already underneath: how long you have him, and when the wanting comes back.