Caleb Rutledge

Martin Healy's house is quiet in the way money makes it quiet. You stand at the kitchen island in his bare feet, in the middle of a Tuesday night, with a glass of water you have not drunk. His knees ache, and the left one clicks when he shifts. For fifty-four years this body has been told it was fine, and it has believed that. Less than a minute ago it was new to you. You already know it is finished. It works, and that is the whole trouble. The numbers on his phone do nothing for you. Nobody in the house is awake to be fooled by you. You have stood in this man's life and found it a coat that fits and is warm and means nothing. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and his thumb is steady, and you pay.

Then there is a mattress under your chest and your face is pressed into a pillow that smells of someone else's hair. Your breath, ragged a second ago, goes even. One arm hangs off the bed, and the blood has gone out of it and left it heavy and tingling. A streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the floor. You pull the arm up. You roll onto your back and fold your hands on your chest, and some distant part of you knows he has never once slept like this.

The first thing you touch is the T-shirt, worn thin, tight at the shoulder. It gives you a morning. His hands are pulling this same shirt over his head on a dark morning, and his stomach is soft over his belt. He isn't ashamed of it, only tired. A girl's voice from the next room calls something about the bag. Then comes the smell of a small child's hair, of cereal, of a sticky hand in his beard. He hasn't been home enough lately. The feeling comes in him, not you, and it is a good ache.

The sheet is tangled around your calf. It remembers a fight, the other woman, the one before, who left in spring with a box of his records. He still has her number. He has not deleted it, and he prays about that. You feel the prayer arrive, plain and unhurried, a Sunday habit he keeps hold of. Under your palm lies the rough denim of the work pants he fell asleep in. Dust is in the creases of the knees. Then the wheel of a machine is in his hands, the track grinding under him, a graded lot going gold in the dust, the heat sitting on him like a hand. He is good at it. Nobody says so. Your fingers know how to lean a blade a half inch without being told.

You open your eyes in the streetlight and lift your hand into it.

It is broad across the knuckles and calloused at the base of each finger. A thin line of dirt is packed under the nails. You turn it over, slowly, and close it, and it closes. Your voice is low when it comes, with a rasp in it that is not yours.

"Hey. Okay. Hey, you."

Somewhere down the hall a child coughs in her sleep. You don't know yet how long he lasts, or when the wanting comes back for something else.