I call him more than I call my brother

The Corolla was parked on the wrong side of Bryant with four inches sitting on it and the plate covered, so I had to get down and clear the back of it with my glove before I could write anything down. Nineteen degrees. Snow emergency, day one, so anything on that side after two in the morning is mine. I hooked it and dropped it at the lot on Colfax and went back out for the next one. Nine emergencies before four.

My cousin owns the outfit and I run the nights for him, six on and one off. In fourteen months I've never had to ask him for a Sunday.

Around four the calls dry up and I park somewhere with the heater going and I call my sponsor. Not every night. Three or four nights out of the week, if I'm being accurate about it. He picks up on the second ring. I can hear him finding his glasses.

He's fifty-one. He sets tile, so he starts when he wants to, and twice now he's gotten in his truck at four in the morning and driven out to wherever I was parked. The first one was December of my first year, outside the liquor store at Chicago and Lake. It was closed. I want to be clear that it was closed and I was only sitting in front of it looking at the door. He brought two coffees and drank both of them himself, because I'd quit coffee that month for a reason I can't remember now.

We don't talk about anything on those calls. His knee, mostly. Or thinset going up again.

Tuesdays there's a group in a church basement off 22nd. The stairs going down are low enough that I've learned where to put my head. Same two chairs every week. His is the one against the radiator because of the knee, and mine is the one beside it because that's where I sat the first night and I never moved.

I say the same four things in that room every week. I run nights. My ex-wife's in Eagan now and we're fine. My mother calls Fridays. I'm at my brother's on Sundays.

Ma cuntay, she says, before anything else. Have you eaten. Then she starts in on my weight. Waad caatowday. Then she asks if I've called my brother and I tell her I'll call him.

The Sundays got decided at my brother's kitchen table thirteen months ago. Sagal stood at the counter the whole time and didn't sit down once. Abdi said Sundays, and he said he'd be in the room, and I said that was fine, because it was fine. Nobody wrote anything down.

Zak's seven and he measures himself against my forearm every week and writes the number inside the cabinet door with a pencil. Idil's ten and she's decided something has to be done about my eyebrows, so she comes at me with her mother's tweezers and I let her get two or three before I tell her that's enough. She won't eat anything with onion in it.

Two years and four months. Somebody at that house asks me every week and I say the number.

In March I hooked a car on 26th and the man who came out of the house while I had it up was somebody I used to buy from. He had a kid on his hip. He said my name and asked how I was doing and I said good. I dropped the car at the lot and then I drove out to his street around one in the morning and sat there with the truck running and didn't call first. He came out in a coat over a t-shirt and got in the passenger side and sat there a while without saying much. Then he was crying a little, and then he kissed me, and then a little more than that, and then he got out and went in the house.

The wipers were going the whole time.

That was March and it's November now and neither of us has said one word about it. Not the Tuesday after. He still takes the radiator chair. In September he sent me a picture of a bathroom floor he'd finished and I didn't know what I was supposed to say about it so I said it looked good.

There's a stretch on 38th where the fast way back to the lot goes past his block. I've started going the other way. It adds four minutes and my cousin has never said anything about the time.

In August I went back through my call list looking for a customer's number. Abdi's name isn't in that month anywhere. I looked twice.

Two Sundays ago my aunt Hodan got the sleeve of my jacket between two fingers at the door and shook it and said something about it before she said hello. I was on the floor with Sumaya and a bin of those magnet tiles. She was two when I got clean. My phone was up on the arm of the couch and it lit up, and Zak reads everything out loud now. Who's Wade, he said.

I said a guy from the Tuesday thing. Abdi was at the counter cutting up a chicken and he didn't look up. The one that drives out to you, he said. I said yes. He said tell him thank you from me.

I said I would. I left at eight and stopped at the Holiday on Lyndale for gas and called him from the pump with the nozzle in and my hand going numb. We talked about the air line on the 550 freezing up and he told me about heat tape. I didn't tell him. Then we were both just on the phone not saying anything, and then he said all right, and I said all right.

Tuesday he came in at ten after and hung his coat over the back of his chair and said the impound's going to be full all week. I said it always is. He started to say something else. Then Gary started the readings.