Anil Donnelly

Walter's brother. I have to start with that, because it is why I am standing in Daniel Pak's kitchen in the dark at the hour the first truck backs up to the loading dock, with Daniel's good knees and Daniel's hazel eyes, and a thumb that keeps finding the beauty mark by my mouth as if to check it is still mine.

It is not that Daniel failed me. He had a store, a ring of keys, a mild way of being looked at. But eleven minutes ago I was Walter's brother in Philadelphia, and I stood in his hallway and picked up the phone, and the voice on it was Walter's, and Walter said *Kieran?* in a way that went through me like a nail. I had not known a name could be so tender and so tired. I hung up. I was not that man long enough to answer, and I have not stopped hearing it. A body that works should be enough. It is not. Something in me wants to be a man nobody has said that to.

So the page, the wheel, the small click of it. Daniel's coffee goes cold on the counter, and then I am not there.

Breath first. Ragged, caught in the throat, and then one pull of air and it is even and slow. My arm is hanging off the edge of a mattress and I draw it up. The body rolls itself onto its back, and the hands fold at the chest, a way he has never once slept, I know it the way you know a stranger's coat. Streetlight through a gap in the curtains lays a white seam across the ceiling. I am on my back. I am sixty-four.

Then the sheets, and the memories come, because the sheets are his.

The cotton is worn thin at the hip, and the sheet gives me the night he stopped sleeping on the left side. A woman's side. He kept the pillow there for a year, then gave it to the closet. Her name rises with the feeling of it, Meera, and what comes with her is not love but its long aftermath, a courtesy so careful it aches. The tan line on my ring finger is against my own thumb, and my thumb rubs it, and I learn it is what he does when he cannot think of the next thing to say.

The T-shirt, gray, soft, the collar stretched, gives me three children at a kitchen table, homework, his voice explaining fractions, and the stammer catching on a hard *p* while his daughter waits without finishing the word for him. Under pressure his hands go tight and the words stutter. He learned to wait out his own mouth. I feel that patience in my jaw.

The pillow smells faintly of him, and the hair at the crown is thin against it, my scalp cool in the air. My belly rises and falls under my folded hands, soft and heavy, a body that has eaten well and rested too little. My lower back has the dull, patient ache of a man who has sat on porches in the morning with coffee and decided that is a life. Wet leaves on concrete, the public stairs between backyards, late light on them: the memory comes through the soles of my feet, still sore from yesterday's climb. He quit drinking on those stairs. He quit smoking there too, years apart, and still reaches for his pocket on the landing.

Papers rustle on the nightstand under my knuckle. Bills. Scraping by, the numbers hum in him like a refrigerator. And the glass of water, his habit, one glass, always set down exactly there.

I lift my hands into the streetlight. The pale band on the finger. The brown skin, creased across the knuckles, not Daniel's, not Walter's brother's. They shake once, and I let them.

I look up at the dark ceiling and say, softly, with his mouth, "Hello." It catches on the *h*, and I wait it out the way he would.

Then the question under it, the one that is always under it: how long does a man like this last me? Until the morning? Until the wanting comes back, and the page opens, and the wheel clicks?