I parked a hundred yards from a corner figure in a hoodie and sat until the engine ticked itself quiet. The figure did business I did not need to name. People came. People left. The lamp made gold out of cheap light. I watched the way I had watched food court doors, which is to say I watched as if looking were a rehearsal.
Measure twice, they say, as if life were lumber. I had measured once in a driveway and gotten a van. I had measured again in a park and gotten a joke. The third measurement was sitting under a cheap gold light, waiting to see if I was still a man who got out of the car.
A sedan rolled up. A window came down. The hoodie leaned in. The sedan left. The hoodie looked at my car once, a flick, the way a person looks at a problem that has not announced itself. I did not wave. Waving is personal. I kept my hands on the wheel. Ten and two. Student. Liar.
I thought about James’s faucet. I thought about a chair I would never sit in. I thought about Mira’s first question and Luis’s last laugh and a guest humming in a trunk that had believed in tape. I thought about the waiting room balloons and the boy kicking latex and the father who never looked up. Looking up is how you become a witness. I had looked up. I had become the thing the father was refusing to be.
The hoodie lit something and the coal was a tiny clock. Time to decide. Time is always a coal if you let it be.
I told myself I could drive home and be a model employee again tomorrow. I told myself I could answer James about Sunday. I told myself the park had taught me that wanting is not the same as knowing how.
Then I told myself the driveway had taught me the other lesson, the one that still lived in my hands. Instinct. A closed space. A person who did not expect the minute to change religions.
The corner waited. The lamp waited. The figure in the hoodie waited without knowing it was waiting for me.