Thomas Brennan

Kevin Tran's thumbs are still sore from the steering wheel, and that is the reason, if I'm honest, though I won't say it to the glass of the van. One day and fifteen hours in him. Forty-one drops since sunrise, and the stairwells in the Valley, and the dog behind the screen door that knew his name by the second visit. He was fine. He was a body that worked. But a man who is twenty-eight and muscular and carries boxes up three flights is a man whom nobody opens a door for slowly. Nobody looks at him the way people look at someone who has come to help. I wanted to be let in by someone who was glad. So I open the page in the cab, in the heat of a Friday, and the wheel turns under my thumb.

The walkway is wet. That is first, the wet, and the cold in my nose, and a buzzer panel under a hand that has just pressed it. I am standing. I am mid-lean. A binder is clamped under my left arm, and my right hand is lifting from the buttons with the keys still hooked in the fingers. The light is the gray of late afternoon, and a window above hums yellow. There is no travel. A breath goes out of someone and I am the one it goes out of.

My hand does the wrong thing. It reaches for the buzzer again, the wrong one, and I stop it, and press the right one slowly, checking the number against the card in my head, which is not my head's card. Then again, each motion checked. The old pressure of a job that never needed checking.

The blazer first. Wool, damp at the shoulders, the lining slick. His feeling comes up through it: a morning, a kitchen, the radio low, his wife's voice from the other room asking if he has his umbrella, and he says yes, and doesn't. He put the left arm in first, always, the way a man does who is stiff in the right shoulder. The shirt next, pale blue, buttoned from the bottom up because the collar is the part he hates. Cuffs rolled once, never twice. The belt is brown and has a hole he punched himself with a nail, a fourth hole past where the leather was made to go, and the shame of that is small and old and his.

The binder is warm where it lay against his ribs. Case files. The corner is soft from his thumb, and the thumb knows it. A woman's name comes up with it: a kitchen on the fourth floor, a child asleep on a couch, a refrigerator with nothing in it but condiments and a bottle of milk he bought himself on the way, and told no one. He has done that for thirty years. He prays about it afterward, plainly, in the stairwell, one sentence. The sentence comes up in my mouth like a coin. I don't say it.

His wedding band is thin and a little loose in the cold. Under the sleeve on the upper arm something itches, fine lines he got at forty because a woman he once loved drew triangles in margins, and he never told his wife why those. The ache of her is not mine and it goes through me anyway, gentle, like a bus passing.

His knees hurt. His lower back has a long dull rope in it. His belly sits over the belt, comfortable, and his breath is shorter than Kevin's by half. The feet are wet in leather shoes that have been resoled twice. He is tired in a way that has nothing to do with the day, and he is kind in the same place the tiredness lives.

I lift my hand from the keys and turn it over. Gray hairs on the back of the fingers, the ring, the slightly swollen knuckle.

I look up, into whatever is looking.

"Okay," I say, in his low voice, rough with weather. "Let's see how long you last."

The buzzer clicks, and the door doesn't open yet.