Wade Hollister

The first thing I do in Brandon Aldous is stand still, and it is a mistake. It is mid-morning in Seattle and the site is loud around me. Somebody is running a saw. My shoulders ache in the good, stupid way that Brandon's shoulders always ache. His beard is damp at the corners from the coffee. He is thirty-two and he has a back like a door. He did nothing wrong and he can lift anything.

But I had him for less than a minute, and in that minute I knew it. He was a very good body for a man who wants to be tired. I do not want to be tired. I want the thing I have not had yet, and I do not know what it is. So I put the level down on the sawhorse, walk around the corner of the framing where nobody is looking, and the page is already open in my pocket. The wheel is already turning, and the tick of it runs down my arm.

The latch is under my fingers.

It is cold steel and a pin that wants to drop into its slot, and I have done it wrong. The pin catches the lip and skids. My hand knows it was wrong before I do, and for half a second the whole rhythm of the body stops. Then I do it again slowly, and it seats with a small clean sound. The light is flat and white, the sky is huge and pale, and there is a pickup behind me on new concrete. I am nobody and I am in a man who has done this ten thousand times.

I check it. I check it again. Ten more times, each one deliberate, each one on a gate that has not needed checking in years.

His cap is tight at the brow. The denim shirt is soft at the elbows and stiff at the cuffs with dried mud, and where it meets my back it holds a warm damp line. The cuff under my thumb gives me a morning: a kitchen with a bad overhead bulb, two small people arguing over a bowl, and his own voice saying *shoes, shoes, shoes* while he buttons this sleeve one-handed, a button at a time, because the other hand is holding a cereal spoon out of reach. The feeling in it is tired love, with a thin wire of dread under it that the numbers do not work. It is a farm he owes more on than it is worth, and he knows it in his stomach the way you know a stair is missing.

My hand goes up on its own and runs over my scalp, back along the hairline where it has retreated to an M. It is a gesture of his, small and unconscious, and the feel of it opens something. A bathroom mirror. A woman's voice behind him, laughing, kind, not his wife. *You're not going bald, you're just getting taller.* That was a long time ago. She is the one he still checks his phone for, and does not call. The ache of it sits in my ribs, specific and borrowed.

The studs in my earlobes are cold. I do not get anything from those, only a faint embarrassment, an old dare.

The steel of the gate frame is under my palm, rough where the paint has gone. Memory comes up through it: his father's hands on this same bar, a church supper afterward, folding chairs, a prayer said over casserole. Faith is plain to him and unshowy, a floor he does not look at. Under my boots the ground is hard and uneven and I feel every ridge of it. My knees are thirty-four years old and they are fine, but the left one tells me about a fall from a tailgate. My lungs are clean. He never smoked and drinks maybe three times a year, and the body is grateful in a way I can feel.

I turn my hands over.

They are broader than Brandon's and chapped across the knuckles, with the nails cut short and square. They are somebody's hands. They are mine now, and they are shaking very slightly.

I look up, past the gate, at the houses standing on the old field like something that grew there overnight.

"Hell of a thing," I say, and his voice comes out low and dry, a Texas mouth around my words.

Somewhere in my pocket, in a pocket I do not have anymore, is a page with a wheel on it. I wonder how long before I want it again. I wonder if I am still him by dark.