Page 59 of Puck You Both

"He was never in a wall." Wall comes down the ladder one rung at a time, and stoops to look into the crate. Gary opens one eye, evaluates him, and goes back to sleep. "He left Moreau’s shoulder at 11:15, cleared the paint station, tested two crates, and picked the third." Then, he adds, "I like him."

Begrudgingly, Becker takes his thumbnail photo of the sleeping cat. “I’m captioning it ‘Employee of the month’.”

And I stand there, holding a clipboard I've forgotten about, watching Wall watch the cat. That's the entire man, in one afternoon. Six hours on a ladder without one complaint. A found family orbiting him like he's furniture that dispenses good judgment. Hendrix spent twenty minutes standing on his head this morning, and Wall let him stay, steady as a statue, wearing a parrot like a crown, until Hendrix got bored and left to threaten the audio tech about tips. Nothing on this site escaped him. The cat, the cameras, Becker's spiral. Me. He sees everything and says almost none of it. I’ve spent years mistaking that for coldness.

But it isn't coldness, is it? It's attention. He loves watching things.

Our eyes meet for a brief moment. I look away first, which never used to happen.

***

THE DONOR TOUR comes through at three. A few local families, a sponsor rep, a kid in a Vipers jersey who looks at me like I hung the moon and then, disloyally, at Wall like he hung a bigger one.

"Could we get the rivals?" the dad asks, phone already up. "You know. The glare."

We know the glare. We assemble it. Wall looks down at me by three inches, and I look up at him by the same three, and the kid is delighted, and the phone clicks, and under the noise, barely moving his mouth, Wall whispers, "Your boyfriend isn’t the best pet-sitter, huh?"

"He's not my—"

I stop it there.

Not the glare. The glare holds, because years of practice can survive anything. The sentence just ends, mid-air, with nowhere to go, because every available ending is wrong. Boyfriend is a word we've never used, but denying it feels like lying in the wrong direction. Teammate is a demotion I don't have the heart to issue. Whatever it is, doesn't come in a form I can say next to a stranger's phone.

Wall's eyes flick to mine briefly, and the photo ends and the family moves on, thrilled, and I stand there having lost a fight with my own vocabulary.

My hand goes to the mic pack on my belt. Dead since morning. The relief that goes through me is disproportionate and has an aftertaste, because a dead battery is not a plan, and the sentence is still sitting there, unfinished, waiting for me somewhere down the calendar.

He's not my.

I carry the missing word around for the rest of the day like a stone in my shoe.

***

MY FATHER CALLS at five, while the crew resets lighting for the last segment and I've stepped out onto the loading dock for air. "Patryk!"

"Cześć, tato."

"Ola sent me a video." There’s delight in his voice, and behind it, the kitchen radio plays at full volume, the same one he’s had since before I was born. "From your bar event. You looked happy." There’s a pause, and I can hear him holding the phone closer, the way he does when he wants a real answer. "I watched it four times. It's good for the animals, this campaign?"

"It's good for the animals. We're back in Milwaukee today. They gave me a hammer as a prop."

He laughs, big and unguarded, and switches to Polish to tell me about the neighbor's fence, and a recipe he's fighting with, and how Ola's youngest made the junior team in Gdańsk, and I stand on a loading dock with my eyes closed, letting home arrive the way only his voice can bring.

"You sound lighter," he says, in English again, which is what he does when he wants me to hear something precisely.

"The season's going well."

"I didn't ask about the season."

The loading dock is quiet. Inside, muffled through the wall, somebody's power drill runs and a grandmother laughs, and I stand holding the phone with the afternoon's unfinished sentence right there behind my teeth. He's not my—. My father would take the ending of that sentence and put it somewhere warm, I know it. I have thirty years of evidence about exactly who he is, and for two full seconds I'm going to say it. All of it.

"Tato—"

"Mm?"

The sentence doesn't come. It's not ready.

"I'll call Sunday," I say instead.