Andre Fontaine

You are standing in Liam Doherty's body in a kitchen when you decide, and you will not remember what was on the stove. Nineteen, six-two, a moustache you have stroked forty times in the last minute without meaning to. He is lovely and he works. Every part of him does what you ask. That is the trouble. A body that never refuses you has nothing left to teach you, and one minute in, you already know the length of his stride and the sound of his laugh. You have started to hear yourself in it. Nobody told you it would feel like that, so you open the page and put your thumb on the wheel the way you would press a bruise. It spins.

Then the lectern is under your forearm.

You are standing mid-motion with a page between two fingers, halfway to turning it. The hall rises behind you, rows of empty chairs. The radiators tick. You are heavier than you were a second ago, and the weight sits low and settled. Your breath comes slow and deep through a nose that is not quite straight. You turn the page the wrong way, tearing the corner against the binding. You do it again slowly and correctly. The next ten pages you turn one at a time, checking each, because your hands are not sure they are yours.

The jacket comes first. The tweed is rough at the wrists, and the elbow patches are worn smooth where his arms have rested on a thousand desks. A hand takes it off a hanger in the dark of a hallway, in his feeling and not yours. The wool smells of a closet and cigar smoke, and under that, a woman's lavender. She is asleep in the next room. He moves quietly so as not to wake her, and the love of that is so ordinary that it nearly knocks you down.

The sweater is next. It is black, and the waffle weave sits snug across a belly he has stopped apologizing to. He pulled it over his head in the cold, one arm and then the other, and the collar caught on his ear. The khakis go on one leg at a time, and the left cuff is rolled twice because the hem frays. Under that cuff is a swallow, bold lines gone soft in the color. He got it at twenty-two on a dare from his cousin, and he has never once regretted it. He laced the shoes sitting on the edge of a bed, and his knees reminded him he is forty-seven.

The strap of the bag cuts a line across your collarbone. When your fingers touch the leather, you get a rush of him: a student's paper, a spring afternoon, a letter of recommendation written at midnight for a kid nobody else believed in. The kid cried in the doorway. He pretended not to notice. Your thumb finds the smooth rail of the lectern, and you know the grain here. This is the spot where he stood the first day, shaking, twenty years ago, when he was thinner and sure he would be found out.

Your face is clean and cool, shaved to the skin that morning. Your palm goes to your jaw and rests there. He did this at the mirror in the gray light, humming a hymn from Mass. Money sits somewhere behind all of this, quiet and old, like the house with the porch and the storm door. He never spent it loudly. He was proud of that, and he was afraid of it too.

Your lower back aches. Your shoulders are broad and strong. Your hands are broad and steady, and they know exactly where the chalk is without being asked.

You lift your right hand off the page and turn it over. The palm is creased and warm. The ring finger is bare. A faint pen line runs along the side of the first knuckle.

You look up at the empty rows and say aloud, in a voice deeper than any you have worn, "Well. Good morning."

Nobody answers. You wonder how long the voice stays yours, and whether you will still be standing in it when this class begins.