Andre Lamont Pruitt

You are twenty-five and your stomach hangs over your belt, and you have been Cody Harmon for seven minutes. The stockroom smell is still in his shirt, cardboard and floor cleaner. He cannot do the thing you wanted. You tried to make him walk out of the dark trailer and into the desert road, and his body flinched at the dark. His legs would not go. Everyone is asleep out here. His one eye is green and the other is brown, and you are sick of seeing both in the black of the window. You have been wearing him for seven minutes and you are already done. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

The fork stops halfway up.

The kitchen is cold, and a tired yellow light hums over the sink. You are standing in the middle of a bite. Your jaw is set to take it and your arm is in the air. The fork is a thin plastic one and it bends a little under the weight of rice. You feel his height at once, five-nine but carried differently, the weight sitting level in the hips and not hanging off the belly. A paper carton is in your left hand and it is warm on the bottom. The coat is heavy on your shoulders, and you did not choose it.

You lower the fork. Your hand has already begun to move before you decide. The plastic touches the counter.

The coat collar scratches your jaw, canvas gone soft, and the lining remembers.

It is the hook by his front door, the one that sticks. He took it down in the dark this morning with his other arm already in the sleeve. The cuffs were stiff with cold. He was thinking of a spreadsheet with a red column in it. He was thinking: Monday I have to tell Dana the number. Then he was thinking of nothing, because the stairs creaked and he liked that the house still did that.

You shrug. The coat comes off your shoulders and the cold gets in at once. Under it is a dark sweater, and the wool is warm at the neck. You lift the neck of it without meaning to, and your fingers find your own beard. It is short and trimmed close, and a little damp from the steam of the food. Your hand stays there, rubbing the jaw. It is a habit he has. The thumb knows the line of the cheek. A flash arrives with it. A woman's hand on this same jaw, last autumn, saying, You always do that when you're lying. He wasn't lying. He was only tired. She left anyway, in March, with her good lamp. The feeling is a small hole, and it sits under his ribs like a swallowed stone.

You pull out the chair. The wood is cold through his jeans, which are heavy and stiff at the knee. The denim has his whole week in it. Your knee clicks when it bends, the left one, an old ache. You do not know where it came from. Then the chair arm gives you a Saturday: a pickup game, a rebound, a bad landing at twenty-six, a gym floor, friends laughing as he sat there holding the joint. It is a good memory. It is the kind that makes you smile, and your mouth does it before you can stop it.

You take the fork up again. Even mouthfuls. The rice is salty, the chicken is gone to threads, and he ordered it because the place is open late and the owner knows his name. The cheap fork squeaks on the carton wall. In the cabinet by your elbow there is a tin of wintergreen, and your thumb already knows to reach for it. The want sits in the lip, a little pinch of itch. He has been trying to stop and you can feel the trying, a worn spot he keeps pressing. A glass office comes up through it, door open, always open, people stopping in with problems. He liked being the man who left it open. Nobody tells you that was a choice. It was his, and a small one. It was good.

The window gives back a dark man at a table. He is only a face and a coat on a chair. Past it a low gray sky is starting to come up behind brick roofs. It is early there, and the street has not woken up. At home it is the deep of night and Cody is sitting in a trailer, and nobody will ever look for him.

You put the fork down. You lift your hands in the window light and turn them over. The palms are dry and the knuckles are broad. There is a callus where the pen sits. They are steady. They are somebody's, and now they are yours.

You look up at the black glass, at his eyes, and say quietly, "Okay, Andre."

Then nothing. The refrigerator hums. You wait to feel whether the wanting comes back, and how soon, and whether you will still be here when that gray light finishes arriving.