The Work of the Living Sometimes on a Friday night in August, all any working man wants is the small and fleeting mercy of a dark bar and a cold beer. John Dalton nodded to the woman with tired eyes, on the barstool next to him. When she didn’t reply, he shrugged and smiled. "I’m John. I work at the auto body place, down Valdosta." The silence swallowed his sentence then seemed to echo for a moment between them. He tried again. "I started there a few years back thinking it was just paycheck for a while. You know how that goes." She glanced at him. He was handsome in a common way, the memory of a younger man trapped in an avalanche of advancing gray. Blue collar trim, but the center of him had moved lower the way it sometimes does in a man. But Katie Dowling could see there was something else. Something damaged, like sea salt on a paint job. Something slightly battered that hung in his eyes. She recognized it. She saw it every night in the mirror. That dente...
That last night before she left I went home and stripped. And I scrubbed at my skin and then at my heart trying to wash away the doubt. In the morning I put her bag on the bus and we stood alone in the shadows. The bus driver, an old Indian with eyes that had watched a thousand goodbyes gently said, “All aboard Miss. Got to get gone now.” She started to cry. I wanted to say something about trying to do something right in a world full of wrong, about courage and what it demands. About the ache that crawls inside and attaches itself forever. But I said nothing. She looked up into my eyes one last time and blinked back the tears then she reached out and gripped my hand, feeling for the scar and what was true between us. Got to get gone . . . Then the bus carrying all I knew of love moved away down Old Hope Road. - - - I walked onto the job site out by the county line to pick up my last paycheck. Some brickers were working on the second story of some office building that would ne...