Calvin Thibodeaux

You are thirty-one and you are sitting in a property manager's kitchen, and you have been him for less than a minute. His coffee is still too hot. His phone is face up on the table with a tenant's name on it, a leak in unit four, and you understand that you are not going to answer it. It is not that he is bad. He is fine. He works. The body is easy and the light brown hair falls where he left it, and none of it has anything in it that you have not already had. Something sent you back. It was the leak, maybe, the small clean competence of it, how a man could be handed a whole life and use it to say *I'll send someone Thursday.* You press the site open with a thumb that is still learning to be yours. You pay. The wheel turns. You do not say goodbye to the kitchen.

Now there is a flame under your palm.

Your hand is cupped around it, a tea light from a supermarket bag, warm against the fingers, the wick bending. A window is open in front of you, and the wet street breathes in with steam on it and sun behind the steam. The flame leans toward you against that wind and stays leaning. A name is already in your mouth, and you say it again, warmer: *Danny.* It was not your word. The photograph is propped against the glass, and you do not look at it yet.

Your feet are on old floorboards, and the boards give a little, and the give is a house. The flannel is on your shoulders, sleeves rolled twice, and the cuff under your thumb brings the morning: his hands, not yours, working the button at the wrist while a woman in another room runs water. *You're wearing that again,* she says, kind. He is. It is the one that smells like her laundry soap and his own work. The undershirt is the dark one, soft at the collar. The jeans have a hard knee from the trench. The boots are laced the way he laces them, tight at the ankle, the right one first, always the right one first.

The windowsill is paint over paint, and under your fingertips it opens. A boy, nine, a brother two years older who could swim the canal. Danny. A funeral where he stood in a borrowed jacket and did not cry because crying was for other people. A year of nights when he drank until the ceiling went soft. Then a church basement, bad coffee, a man holding a pen and clicking it, click, click, while he talked, and now your own right hand has found a pen that is not there. Your thumb works the ghost of it. He does that. Eleven years sober, and nobody at the job knows why he will not come to the bar after.

The ring on your left hand is a cool band, and it gives you a marriage, not all of it: a kitchen, a bad winter, her saying *you can talk to me* and him saying *I know,* and not doing it. So he lights candles. He lights them here, in the front room, the one room wide, where she does not come. You feel the shame in it and the love in it as one thing. Under that, thinner, almost a draft: another woman, recent, a text he did not delete. You do not follow it. It is his, and it hurts like a tooth.

The body is forty-two. The lower back is stiff from shoveling spoil beside the machine. The shoulders are strong and a little ruined. The beard is coarse against your collar, and the mole high on your cheek itches when you breathe. You are shorter than you expect, and steadier.

You breathe out toward the candle, and the breath goes on longer than the lungs should hold, and the flame goes out. A thread of smoke climbs and bends out the window.

You lift your right hand and look at it, the faded ink on the forearm, the scarred knuckles. You turn it over. Then you look up, and you say to the street, quietly, in a voice that is a little rough, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Nobody answers. The steam keeps rising off the road. You wonder whether the wanting will come back by supper or by the time you reach the trench, or whether you are still him tomorrow.