Tom Brewer

You are standing in a kitchen in Philadelphia, in Shane Gallagher's body, and the coffee in his hand has gone lukewarm. Three minutes. He has freckles on his forearms and a machine operator's calluses, and you keep waiting for him to feel like a place you live. He doesn't. He feels like a coat that fits and belongs to someone else, and the wheel is already open on his phone, glowing and patient.

There was nothing wrong with him. That is what you will not say out loud. His knees were good and his back was good, and the morning outside the window was ordinary. But three minutes in, you heard your own breathing from the inside and it sounded like nobody. You want the weight of somebody who has carried something for a long time. You press the screen.

The sun is on the back of your neck. Your hands are already moving, flat on a cardboard box in the open back of a van, and the hinge of your jaw is clenched hard enough to ache. Warm air smells of tape, dust and hot metal. Down the street a red light hangs over an empty crossing, and across from it a diner sits with its door shut and a sign gone pale in the glass. The rhythm breaks: your hand lands wrong on the box. You do it again slowly, correctly. Then the next, and the next, each one checked, and each one is a job that has not needed checking in years.

The polo is damp against your back, and the damp opens something. A dark bedroom, a quarter to five, a woman's breath beside him. He dressed in the hall so he wouldn't wake her, one sleeve and then the other, the brown cotton smelling of her detergent. He stood a second at the door of the small room across the hall, where his daughter sleeps with one foot out of the blanket. He did not go in. He never goes in. He thinks if he goes in he'll stay.

The scanner at your hip knocks your thigh. Under your thumb the box edge gives, and you are a younger man in a parking lot behind a different diner, long before this one closed, and a girl is laughing at something he said. She is the one who got away. He doesn't think of her often. He thinks of her exactly as often as the light is like this.

The ring is warm on your left hand. It spins loose over a knuckle that has thickened since he bought it. Memory comes up through the band: his wife's hands, flour on them, her saying *you don't have to carry everything*, and him carrying it anyway. The boots grip the plank floor. His shoulders are wide and strong, his belly is heavy, and a dull ache sits low in the spine, a thing he stopped noticing at forty. He has money put away, not much, and he counts it in his head sometimes at red lights. He quit drinking without announcing it. He believes in nothing in particular and gets up anyway.

You lift your hands off the box and look at them. They are thick, steady and sunburned across the knuckles, and the gold band catches the light. You turn them over, then raise your eyes to the empty street and the diner's dead window.

"All right," you say, quietly. "You."

The light stays red. You don't know how long you have him. It could be years. It could be before the next breath goes out.