Wesley Torrance

The dust takes its time coming down. It always does — hangs in the hall light like something deciding whether to settle. I watch it drift onto shoulders that aren't mine, plaid gone gray with plaster, and I flex fingers I have to relearn: the calluses in the wrong places, a scar through the eyebrow I can feel but not see.

I know this hallway. I've been in it before, dropping him off, waiting in the truck while he grabbed his lunch pail, half-listening to him complain about his girlfriend's cousin staying too long on the couch. I know this house the way you know a coworker's house — from the driveway, from the porch, never past the kitchen.

Down the hall a woman's voice rises, shaking worse than the ground did. "Wes? Wes!" And I go toward it because his legs already know the way, because some current under the wanting just carries the body where it's supposed to go, and I let it, for now.

She's fine. A vase broken, a shelf down, nothing worse. She grabs onto him — onto me — with both arms and I feel my own borrowed heart going hard and fast, adrenaline that isn't fear anymore, that's something closer to relief. I say the things he'd say. "I'm okay. I'm okay, hey." My voice comes out steady, low, a little rough, and it surprises me every time, how much like him I sound when I'm not trying.

At the mine the next morning, the guys ask if the house held up. I say yeah, barely, and laugh the way he laughs, and nobody looks twice, because why would they. I was just another man at the cage yesterday. Now I'm the one they clap on the shoulder and call by his name.

I go through the motions of him for four weeks. I eat what he'd eat. I sleep next to her and don't reach for her, tell myself it isn't mine to take, though some nights the body wants what it wants and I let it want quietly, in the dark, without doing anything about it. I scroll through a phone with a thread to an ex-girlfriend that I don't answer, though I read it twice, some nights, the way you'd touch a bruise to see if it still hurts him somewhere I can't reach.

The tattoo on his arm I trace once in the bathroom mirror, script mostly hidden by the sleeve — a name, a date. I don't ask him what it means, because he isn't anywhere I can ask. I just carry it around like I carry the rest of him: careful, borrowed, temporary.

At the pit entrance, mornings, I stand where he always stood, cage behind me, hard hat light off until we're below. I brace sometimes without meaning to, waiting for the ground to move again, hands finding a doorframe that isn't there.

It never does. Not the whole month. The earth holds its shape, and so, mostly, do I — wearing his shoulders, his scar, his ordinary tired body, walking his ordinary tired life until the day I'm not asked to anymore, and I set his hands down gently, like something I found and am required, finally, to give back.