Arjun Pillai

You are standing at the kitchen window of a man named Frank, and the coffee in his mug has gone cold because you have not drunk it. His thumb keeps finding the soft place where the wedding ring used to be, though he never had one for you to feel. Thirty-five times you have done this. Frank is thirty seconds old in your life, a bald head in the window glass, a moustache, a belly that sits on the belt like a held breath. He is fine. That is the trouble. Last night in his car, at a red light, a song came on and his hands knew every chord of it on the steering wheel, and your hands did not, and something in you went small and mean. You wanted a man who could do something. So you tell yourself it is greed. You walk to the laptop, you pay, and the wheel turns.

Click.

The number board says 48 and your knee stops bouncing on the same click. A paper cup is in your hand, warm. You set it down square on the seat beside you. You fold your hands. Strip light, a hum in it. Third chair from the door. Your name is called, a woman's voice, and you do not look up, because you are not ready to be anyone's name yet.

The shirt comes first. The flannel is soft at the cuffs, worn thin where forearms rest on edges, and the cuffs hold a morning: a dark room, a floor, the green layer under the grey tee, pulled on in the wrong order and fixed. He was not sleeping well. The left sleeve first, because his shoulder complains. Then the tee, AURORA BLUES, from a bar in Austin where eleven people came and one of them cried. He felt proud for a week. The jeans are stiff at the thigh. He bought them for a wedding gig and wore them to a funeral, and they hold the smell of an old church and a long drive home.

His right ear is thick and lumpy under your fingertips, and the memory comes with a smell of rubber mats: a gym above a feed store, a boy of nineteen, a coach shouting, the ear swelling hot, and nobody draining it. He was good for a year. Then he found out that guitars hurt less. Your hand is already tapping his pocket, where a pen lives, and his thumb clicks it, click, click, the way it does when money is the subject. The pen is from a clinic. The forms in the folder on your knee are for his mother's medication, and the number is more than the account holds. Five thousand, maybe, on a good day. A pack a day, and the cigarettes are a weight against his hip. He quit drinking the winter after a night he will not name, only the sound of a glass breaking and his own voice being someone else's.

The strap of a guitar case has worn a groove into his shoulder, though the case is not here. Your body leans for it anyway. Beneath all that, the road: gravel, wire, the water tower standing on the flat edge of everything like a held thought, and the quiet he drives home into. He prays, sort of, to nobody, to the grain of the dark. It has never answered. He does not mind.

Your back aches in the cheap chair. Your lungs are rough and bright. Thirty years of weight settle through your heels, a lean strength, a wiry tiredness. Your fingertips are hard as horn, and the left ones want a fretboard so badly they twitch.

You lift your hands. You turn them over. The calluses are a map you cannot read. They are not yours. They are yours.

You look up at the door where the woman waits, and you say, quietly, "Give me a second. I'm still finding my feet."

Somewhere behind your ribs the wanting is asleep. You don't know for how long.