Brian Kessler

You are Dennis Kilcoyne, and you have been him for three minutes, and already you know what's wrong with him.

It is the middle of the night in Boston and the whole house is asleep. You are standing in a kitchen that is not yours, in a body that is not yours, with a unibrow you keep finding with your thumb. Dennis's knees are bad in a way that comes up through the linoleum. His shoulders carry a day of other people's lumber. Three minutes was long enough for the thing to show: he is a man who cannot be still. His jaw works while he stands. His hands want a tool. You wanted to be tired in a good way, and he is only tired. Something about him won't let you sit inside it. So you take out the phone, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then you are lying down, and the dark is a different dark.

Your breath is ragged and then it is not, one long pull, and the ragged part is gone. You are face-down in sheets twisted around your legs. One arm hangs off the mattress, the knuckles almost touching carpet. Light comes through a gap in the curtains, a thin white blade from the street. The pillow smells of sweat and of detergent.

Your arm draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold at your chest, a posture he has never once slept in.

The shirt is soft and worn under your fingers, and it gives you something. Brian, his own name, said by a girl's voice, the youngest, from a doorway. *Dad, you're on the wrong side of the bed.* It was the apartment after the house, the mattress on the floor for the first month. Her laugh. The shirt was a gift from the oldest, who picked the color: *it matches your eyes, you big baldy.*

The sheet is cool against your calves. You reach and the stubble on your jaw is rough, two or three days. Your palm goes over your scalp, smooth and warm, without being asked. The gesture is a habit older than you. It comes with a memory of a store aisle before opening, pallets waiting, the box cutter in this same hand, the first slit through the shrink wrap. He liked that. He liked a thing being undone cleanly. He was a manager and he hated the word and loved the aisle at six in the morning, empty, humming.

The ring finger. You rub the thumb across it, and the skin is paler there, a band of tan the sun never reached. The memory is not a picture but a weight: standing in the kitchen of the old house, taking it off, and setting it in a dish beside hers. Not anger. Worse. Politeness. Her name is Colleen, and she still calls when the kids are sick, and he still answers on the first ring, every time, and stands there afterward holding the phone like something warm.

His chest rises evenly. Nothing hurts. Thirty-nine years sit in him easy, with a little stiffness in the lower back and a clean strong heart. There is money put away, not much, a cushion. He thinks about the kids' tuition when he thinks about it. He believes in something, he could not say what, a feeling at the top of the marble steps outside when the first sun comes down the block.

The curtain light lies across your hand.

You lift it and look. The wrong tan line. The knuckles are broad and clean, no scars. You turn it over, palm up, and flex it once. Dennis's hands were rough and these are not. You lift your eyes.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, low and slightly hoarse. "Okay, Brian. Hello."

And the question is already under it, quiet as the street: how long. Whether you will still be here when the light turns gray, or whether the wanting comes back before it does.