Brian Kessler

Martin Fitzgerald's heart is doing something it has not done before, a flutter under the sternum like a moth in a lamp. Sixty-five years old, a corner office high above the lake, and the cardiologist's number is face-down on the desk. I let it sit there. I have been Martin for less than a minute and already I know what he is: a body that is going to be a long list of appointments. That is why I am back at the page. The wheel is waiting, patient, round, and I do not tell myself the reason out loud. I press.

Then the office is gone and there is a handwheel in my fists.

Cold iron, slick with oil. My feet are planted wide on a rubber mat, and the whole body is leaning into a motion already in progress: the crank turning, the carriage creeping along the bed. A hum comes up through my boots. The air smells of cutting oil and hot metal. Through the window, a stoplight hangs over an empty street, and across from it a diner with its lights off.

The motion goes wrong. My wrist is half a beat early, and the hand jerks. I stop. I do it again slowly, correctly, and the carriage obeys. Then ten more, and I check each one. I look at the dial, and I look again.

The coat comes first. Rough cotton, blue, stiff at the cuffs. I feel the morning he put it on: a kitchen, a woman's back at the stove, his thumbs working the buttons from the bottom up because he has always done it that way. A child's voice says *Dad, shoes*. The belt, the dark green shirt beneath, collar already soft from a hundred washes. He smooths the lapel the way you straighten a thing you are proud of.

The handwheel gives me more. Nineteen years of it, his hands learning the weight of every lever, the shop's old foreman showing him a thread, saying *slow is how you get fast*. A day his father was in the hospital and he came to work anyway, because the part was due. The ring on his left hand clicks against the iron, and with it comes his wife laughing in a church parking lot, and two small heads bowed over a table while he says grace, his voice low and sure. He does not drink anymore. A night, years back, that he does not like to think about, and then a morning that was better. He has paid off the house. He has money put by that nobody in this town would guess at, because he drives a ten-year-old truck and never says.

The body is good. Thirty-eight. The shoulders are loose and strong, the back has a faint ache low on the left from standing, the knees do not complain. My breath goes all the way down. After Martin's chest, that alone is almost unbearable. His jaw is smooth under my fingers where I touch it, shaved this morning, and the hair at his neck is clipped hard and bristles against my palm.

I let go of the wheel. I turn his hands over, oil in the creases, the plain gold band catching the window light. They are steady. They are somebody's. They are mine.

I look up, past the lathe, past the stoplight, and I say, "Well. Hello."

The machine hums on. Somewhere a man in Chicago is sitting in an office with a bad heart and no one inside, and I do not think of him. I think: how long will this hold? Until tomorrow, until supper, until the wanting comes back? I flex the fingers once, and wait to find out.