Anthony Rahul Marchetti

You have been Raymond Boudreaux for five hours, and in five hours you have learned what he cannot do. He cannot stand still. The golf shop in the Tuesday afternoon is quiet, the humidity sits on the glass like a hand, and the bearded face in the mirror by the glove rack, the scar cutting his eyebrow in two, looks back at you with the patience of a man who has never wanted anything he could not buy at the counter. The pro shop smells of leather and cut grass. A member is asking about a wedge. Raymond's body knows the answer, because his hands know the weight of clubs, and you do not. You stand in the knowledge like a coat that fits someone else. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. Everything he is has been easy, and you wanted something that costs. So you open the page with the wheel on it and pay, and the wheel goes round, and you let go of the counter.

Light. Then weight. You are standing, and your right hand is flat against a spool of yellow tubing turning slowly on its arm, and your left is already lifting toward it, and half a second of nothing is wrong with the motion. You do it wrong. The hand goes where it has gone ten thousand times and you are not in the hand yet, and the spool catches. You stop. You do it again, slowly, correctly. The roar of the machine is muffled, because something soft is hanging at your collar, and your breath comes in short through a nose that does not run straight.

Now the body arrives in pieces. Sixty-odd kilos of extra tiredness in the calves, the ache at the base of the spine that belongs to a man who has stood on concrete for twenty years. Five foot seven, the world a little closer than it was in Raymond. Stubble at the jaw, rough against your shoulder when you turn your head. Heat from the barrel of the machine on the left side of your face.

The shirt first. Navy cotton, soft from washing, rolled twice at each forearm, and against your back it brings a morning: a kitchen in Brooklyn, a woman's voice, Denise, saying he'd left the other one on the radiator. His fingers on the buttons, bottom to top, the way his mother taught him in a house that smelled of cardamom and Sunday gravy. A feeling comes with it, plain and unspoken: she waits up, he is grateful, he never says it.

The gloves, stiff in the back pocket, hold something older. A first week on this line, a foreman shouting over the noise, burning his wrist on the die and being told you only do that once. He did it twice. The shame is still warm.

The ring on your left hand. You turn it with your thumb and the whole of a church comes up: St. Rose on a cold morning, a candle, his father's crooked nose in the pew beside him, and his own, broken at sixteen on a stoop in the rain and set by a man who did not apologize. He was not afraid. He was never afraid; only careful, ten thousand times, until tonight, when you made him wrong for half a second.

Under your boots the floor is cold through the sole, and the window pours late gold across the tubing, and beyond the open door a brownstone stoop waits wet and orange.

You lift your hand and look at it. The knuckles are thick, the nails clean, a ring that is not a promise you made. You turn it over. Then you look up, into the light.

"Well," you say, in a voice with Brooklyn in it. "Let's see how long you last."