Travis Boudreaux

You are leaving Daniel Wong because of the chalk.

It is on his fingers again, the dry white of it, from a board you will never stand at again. Forty-six years of knees, and a nose that was broken once and whistles when he sleeps. All night you have lain in his kitchen in Boston with the stove light on and a stack of ungraded quizzes under your elbow, and nothing is wrong. That is the whole trouble. His life closes around you like a good coat. His students like him. His refrigerator hums in a key you could learn. You have been him for less than a minute, and the minute was enough to know exactly how the rest of it would go.

So the phone is in his hand, and the page is open, and the wheel is already turning under his thumb. You do not say goodbye to the nose.

Then the dark, and a different weight.

You are on your side. The mattress sags toward the middle and takes your hip with it. Blue light is on your cheek, a phone six inches from your face, your thumb stopped on something you were not reading. Your own breath comes in slow and a little wet through the nose, the breath of a big man almost asleep. Through the window the street is quiet. Somewhere a pipe ticks. Somewhere beside you, someone who lives here is breathing, and you do not turn.

Your thumb moves. It is quicker than his was, steadier, flicking past a truck for sale, a man shouting about a game, a photograph of a baby in a yellow bath. You go past all of it. You can feel how much of him you are scrolling over.

The shirt is the first thing to talk. It is cotton, thin, washed to softness at the collar, and where it lies against your ribs the memory comes up warm and sideways. This is not the work shirt. This is the one he sleeps in, and before that it was the one he wore the week the baby came home, a gray T-shirt that smelled of milk and drying laundry. He stood in a hallway at four in the morning with a small hot weight on his chest, and he was so afraid of his own hands that he held them flat. He is not afraid of anything now. The fear is a stone worn smooth.

The sheet under your palm is cool and creased. It gives you the girlfriend: a laugh in the next room, a hand taking the bottle from him, her saying, *You're doing it fine, Trav.* Trav. The name sits in your mouth like a stone you could swallow.

Your tongue finds the gap in your front teeth. It is a small door, and it opens straight onto a boy of nine with a fork in a school cafeteria, a girl laughing, him laughing back and showing it, and then learning slowly that the gap was the best thing about him. People remember it. A customer once called him *the gap guy* and tipped him twenty.

The body underneath all this is honest. It is heavy, thirty-four and heavy, and the heaviness is not soft everywhere. Your shoulders hold a day of lifting. Your forearm, braced on the mattress, has a dull ache at the elbow that is the ache of overhead work, of drilling up into joists with your arms raised for hours. Your fingertips are rough against the glass of the phone, and your thumb knows a hundred small tasks by heart: the twist of a wire nut, the stripping of insulation, the feel of a live line before it is dead. Your lower back complains in a low, familiar voice. Your stomach has eaten late and is quietly sorry.

The phone case is cracked at one corner. The crack catches your thumbnail, and he is in a half-finished ceiling with conduit running over his head, a headlamp strapped on, sweat in his eyebrows, a boss below hollering a number. He is happy there. That is the surprise. Not rich, not proud, just exact. A circuit tested and good. A little money tucked away where nobody sees it, an account he checks the way other men check a pulse. And under it, folded small, a thing he has never told anyone: he is tired of being the guy who fixes what everyone else lives in. He wants to build one house all the way up. He has drawn it on the back of a permit, and the permit is in the glove box of his truck.

You did not ask for the house. It comes anyway, with the smell of sawdust and the feeling of a dream carried gently.

The thumb stops. The blue light holds on your face, and you stop blinking where he would have blinked.

You lift your hand off the screen and look at it. It is broad across the knuckles, the nails cut short and square, a pale line of old grime in the creases. You turn it over. The palm is a map of calluses. It is not yours, and it already knows how to hold things.

Then you look up, past the phone, at the dark.

"Okay," you say, in a voice with gravel and Louisiana in it. "Okay, Trav."

The street ticks beyond the window. Someone sleeps beside you. You flex the hand once and wonder how long the wanting will stay quiet this time, whether tomorrow's light will find you here, still carrying him.