Warren Teague

You are Paul Fenwick, and your knees ache on the kitchen linoleum in Queens, nearly midnight, a Wednesday. The truck keys hang on their nail. Tomorrow's route is on the fridge in his handwriting, now yours. You have been him for less than a minute by your own count, and already you know what is wrong. The body works. The freckled forearms are fine. But when you reached to turn off the stove light, your hand knew the switch before you did, and the knowing was not yours. It was a stranger's habit, on a stranger's wall. You do not want to be lent things. You want to be given them. So you open the page with the wheel on it and pay, and the wheel spins its little ticking spin, and you let go of Paul.

Arrival. You are sitting, forearms on knees, under a steel rack in a garage that smells of rubber and cold concrete. A bare bulb hangs above you. A water bottle sweats on the floor. Your breath is mid-exhale. Your hands go to the bar, two inches wider than they have gone all year, and you grind the rep out slowly. Your face does none of what a last rep does.

The bench is rough under your thighs, and splinters of old pine catch the denim. Through it comes a flash, in his feeling: a church basement, folding chairs stacked just like the ones against this wall, and the relief of lifting something that did not need a sermon. The gray T-shirt sticks to your spine, and the morning arrives sleeve by sleeve. His arms went through it in a dark kitchen, quietly, so as not to wake her. Her name is in the cotton somehow: a wife, asleep, one foot out from the blanket. He stood there longer than he needed to. He was thinking about a sentence for Sunday that would not come.

Your right leg is bouncing. It has been bouncing the whole time, and it will not stop when you tell it to. The ring on your left hand is warm and thin. You touch it with your thumb, and a whole year comes up: a younger woman, the one before, a recent ex who still sends him messages he reads in the parking lot and does not answer. He has never told anyone. Shame sits in his chest like a swallowed stone, and it is his, not yours. Under it, a child's drawing taped to a refrigerator, a crooked sun, and he is crying in a car in a gravel lot beneath saguaro silhouettes, in a light so bright it whitened the dashboard, because the roof fund is short again and the congregation is smaller and he must stand in front of them anyway. The boots on your feet are worn soft at the toes. He bought them to stand in. His shoulders ache. His forty-seven-year-old knees are good, though, and the arms are strong. This is a body that has chosen to be tired on purpose.

You lift your hands off the bar and look at them. They are square, tanned, the knuckles creased, the wedding band plain. You turn them over. Then you lift your eyes and say, to the empty garage, "Well. Hello, Warren."

The leg keeps bouncing. You wait for the wanting to come back, and you cannot tell how long that will take.