Walter Beaverson

You are standing in Luis Arroyo's kitchen in Philadelphia, a body you have worn for less than a minute, and already the blond stubble on his jaw itches under your knuckle. The coffee maker ticks. His wife's shoes are by the door, small and scuffed. His phone says there is a meeting at eight about a freight contract, and he has been dreading it for a week, and the dread comes up through his chest like a stair you didn't know was there. You can't use it. You don't want his dread. You wanted something and he was not it, and you open the page with his thumb. The wheel is already turning.

The gravel takes your left foot, and then it doesn't. Your pace breaks for two steps, a stumble that never lands, and you come down on the other foot with your arms lower and your head still. Cold air tears in through your nose. Your breath shows in front of you. A watch buzzes on your wrist with a split it has no record of you ever holding.

You are running. Your lungs are working at the edge of comfort, and the canal lies flat and smoking to your left, the sky going from blue to a bruised orange behind the trees. Something small is in your ear, a voice reading numbers. You pull it out and the world gets quieter and larger. Your heart is slow and heavy and steady, a sixty-two-year-old heart that has done this many mornings. Your calves are tight. The right knee has an opinion about the gravel.

You slow to a walk, and the fleece begins to talk. The zipper is cold under your chin. You pull at the cuff and it gives you a morning: his wife, still in bed, one arm thrown over her face, and him standing in the dark bedroom with the fleece in his hands so the zipper wouldn't rattle. He carried his shoes down the stairs. He loves her for sleeping, and the love is a plain warm weight, like a hand on the back of the neck.

The ring turns under your thumb. A flash comes with it: a church basement, folding chairs, bad coffee, a number he said out loud. Sober by decision. He has not wanted a drink in eleven years, and he still counts the mornings like a man checking a lock. Then another memory, the mezzanine walkway above the distribution floor, the steel grating humming under his boots, forklifts beeping below. He knows every driver by the sound of their reversing. He built that floor from nothing and he never says so. There is money in his life now, more than the town knows. He keeps driving the truck with the cracked dash.

Two children, grown, and a phone call he rehearsed for a week. Your thumb finds the freckled skin of your own cheek, and the memory of a mirror, his father's face looking back.

You hold your hands out. Square, brown, the ring plain on the left, the watch lit green. They know how to tie a pallet strap. They know the weight of a clipboard. They are not yours and they are warm.

You look up the path, where the mist is lifting.

"Morning," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected, and kind. Somewhere in you the wanting is asleep. You don't know for how long.