Brian Kowalski

Four minutes ago you were a boy of twenty-two with freckles and a moustache, sitting in a stranger's kitchen in Philadelphia, and the kitchen was wrong. Terrell's body is heavy and kind and it works. But the old woman in the next room had called his name all morning, and every time you answered it, it still sounded like a word in another language. Nobody had done anything to you. You had simply stood at her sink with the water running over a cup and understood that you had no wish to be tender for one more hour. You put the cup down. You took the phone out of his pocket. Your thumb knew the page before you did.

The wheel turns. Then it is Denver, and it is bright.

Sun on your face, hard and dry, mountains in the corner of your eye. You are leaning against a car, one boot crossed over the other, both thumbs hooked in a heavy belt. Your breath comes slow and deep. The right hand has just finished something. It reached for the door and it did it wrong, a half second off, and now you are doing it again slowly, because you are the one who does not know how. Latch, check, then again. Ten more, each one checked, on a job that has not needed checking in years.

The car's flank is warm through the shirt. Then the memory comes up through the fabric, not yours.

Cotton-poly, pressed. This morning, a bedroom with the blinds still down, a woman's back turned to him, a tiredness that was not about sleep. His fingers went down the buttons, bottom to top, the way he has done for twenty years. The sleeves were rolled twice. The wedding band was already on. He caught the smell of coffee gone cold in a mug he never finished, and a small ache, a promise he'd made to himself the night before about the bottle in the garage. Not yet broken. Not kept either.

Your left leg is bouncing. It has been since you arrived. You did not tell it to. It is the engine of him, a nervous little machine under the knee, and when you stop it, a tightness climbs his hip, the dad-weight of forty-six years pulling at the belt. His belly rests over the buckle. His knees tell you about every stair he has ever taken.

The belt itself is heavy, leather and nylon and steel, and when your palm closes on the grip at his hip, something opens. A kitchen. Three kids shouting over each other, the youngest on his shoulders, screaming with joy, and a woman laughing in the doorway, young, and so purely happy that the feeling nearly knocks the breath out of you. His, not yours. Then another kitchen, years later, a different woman, papers on a table, his own voice saying something level and cold. The first wife. She still matters. It lands as a stone under the ribs.

The arm. You turn the forearm over and there is a face there in black and gray, a woman's, soft, made by a needle that must have hurt. You do not know who she is yet. The skin remembers her anyway, a warm sting, a chair in a shop, his eyes closed, and then it closes over, and you are left with the sun.

Across the lot is a porch, a small bungalow, a rail painted white. A man could sit there with a glass at the end of a day and say it was only one. His mouth knows that taste, sour and gold, and wants it, wants it already, and you have been him for seconds. You have a house somewhere and money, a pension, three kids, two wives, and a tattoo you cannot name. You have all of it and none of it.

You lift his hand. It is broad and square, a ring on it, the knuckles scarred pink. You turn it over. Then you look up at the world he was looking at, and your voice, which is gravel and ease and his, says to no one, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Under it, quiet, the old question: how long, and when does the wanting come back.