Walt Pruitt

The mid-level manager's knees are bad, and that is the whole reason, though you would not say it to anyone. You are Glenn Hartsfield for under a minute, a gray-silver man at a desk with a beauty mark and a good chair, and the first thing he gives you is a cramp. Chair, spreadsheet, hazel eyes in a dark monitor. A man who sits. You had wanted to be someone whose body did something, whose day ended with an ache earned by work. Glenn's body only waits. So you open the page with the wheel, and the wheel turns, and you let go of the chair.

Then you are kneeling.

Cold tile through the knee of your coveralls. A pipe wrench in both hands, jaws set on a chrome trap under a sink, the handle warm from your grip. Your breath is in your nose, and the nose is wrong: a thin whistle on the left, a bend you can feel from inside. Your hands were mid-turn. They did something clumsy, a slip of a quarter inch, and you correct it slowly, deliberately, and the jaws bite right.

You check it. You check the next turn too, then the next. Ten of them, each one tested with a thumb, though your hands know this job better than you ever will.

The wrench handle opens first. Red paint worn to iron where a palm has gone for thirty years. Hands on it that are not yours: a father in a yard, a wrench too heavy for a boy, *righty-tighty, Walter, let the tool do it.* Then the first truck, the first bad leak, the pride of it.

The coveralls come next, stiff navy cotton under your arms. This morning, in a dark kitchen, he stepped into the legs one at a time, his wife's coffee already poured and going cold beside the sink. He zipped to the sternum and felt the old tightness of money in his chest. The truck payment. The second mortgage. The number on the envelope he keeps in the glove box, unopened, because opening it makes it true. He stood there and prayed. *Lord, just let this week be enough.* He believes it, and the belief sits in you like a warm stone you did not ask for.

Your thumb goes to your mouth. Your teeth find the edge of the nail, and you stop it, and the want to chew is not yours, and it is in your jaw anyway. The ring on your left hand turns under your thumb. A girl at a lake, long before his wife, nineteen and laughing, and then his wife in a church basement, and two kids on a porch with a hose. He quit the cigarettes the winter the youngest was born. He quit the bottle after a night he never told anyone about, and in this bathroom his tongue still remembers the taste.

Your knees ache evenly now, a dull ledger of years. Your back is long, six foot five folded onto a floor too small for it. The window shows gravel, barbed wire, a water tower standing in white morning sky. Somewhere his phone is buzzing in a pocket with a name you almost know.

You set the wrench down. You turn your hand over: the scarred knuckles, the bitten nails, the plain gold band. Then you lift your eyes and say, to nobody, "Well. Look at that."

Your thumb finds the ring again, and you wonder how long this one holds before the wanting returns.