Alan Pierzchala

You are standing in a contractor's kitchen, and the contractor's knees are talking. Sixty-three years of them. The coffee in your hand has gone lukewarm and you have not tasted it. Through the window over the sink there is a gravel drive, a truck, and a sky the color of primer, and you have been looking at all of it for less than a minute with a feeling you know well by now. The body works. The freckled forearms work. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble, and you know the shape of the trouble: it is the same flat note every time, the one that starts as quiet and turns into a draft under the door. Somewhere between the first sip and the sink you stopped wanting to be anyone in particular. So the phone is already in the hand that is not holding the cup, and the wheel is already on the screen, and you set the cup down very carefully, as if he might mind.

The wheel turns. It is a stupid, cheap sound.

Then the floor is gone and a different floor is under you, and your thumbs are on a keyboard. Your thumbs, moving. They are in the middle of a motion and you are in the middle of it too, and for half a second the hands do something wrong, a slip, a stutter in a rhythm ten thousand repetitions deep. You stop them. You do it again, slowly. Correctly. Then ten more times, each one checked, though the job has not needed checking in years. Two monitors of code glow in front of you. Beside the keyboard sits a cold coffee in a paper cup. Beyond the big window a wide street of brick houses lies under a low gray sky, and the light is the light of a hour you cannot place.

His breath comes short and shallow, then settles. Standing desk. The weight rides forward on the balls of the feet. He is small, closer to the ground than the last one, and compact, and the compactness is strong: thighs that know stairs, a back that holds itself up without asking. The crown of the head feels cool, the hair thin there. The jaw is rough with a short beard. The nose, when you breathe in, whistles faintly on one side.

The hoodie is soft with washing, and the cuff against your wrist gives you something. Cotton gone velvet. It is the morning he put it on: he stood in a dark bedroom, one arm in, then the other, and a man's voice said from the bed, *you're not going out in that.* He answered, *it's a standing desk, nobody sees me.* Laughter, with sleep in it. A hand reaching out to tug the drawstring. The feeling in it is warm, ordinary, and so settled that it stings you somewhere that has no business stinging.

The headphones around the neck are heavy, and when your fingers find them the memory comes in a whole afternoon: a long bug, a bad deploy, the world shrunk to a single line, and a pride so private he has never once said it aloud. He is very good. Thirty years of being the one they call. Under the pride, a thin sour thread, and you follow it to the pocket and find the gum there, the nicotine gum, and the sourness is a craving. Nine days. He counted them this morning on the stairs, and counted again at the sink. The want sits in the back of the throat like a held note, and it is his, not yours, and you are astonished by how much it asks of you.

Your knuckles crack. You didn't do it. The hands did, on their own, a little roll and pop, and with it comes a flash of the schoolyard, a boy with a bloody face and a nose that took the wrong angle, a coach saying *it'll set itself,* and it didn't, quite. You touch the bridge of it. Crooked, and loved by someone.

The ring is on the left hand, plain, a little loose in winter. Turning it brings a kitchen, a table, a husband's laugh at a bad joke about semicolons. Then a younger face across a hospital bed holding something small and furious and new: the child, grown now, far off, who calls on Sundays. His chest fills with it. It is not yours. You stand in it anyway, breathless, a trespasser at somebody's whole life, and the sneakers on the concrete are cold through the soles.

You lift your hands off the keys and look at them. Small, square, graying at the knuckle, the ring bright. You turn them over. Then you raise your eyes to the window, to the brick and the gray, and say, quietly, in a voice that is not quite yours yet:

"How long do I get you?"

The coffee is cold. The cursor blinks. Nothing answers, and the wanting has not started, and you do not know when it will.