Charles Renfroe

The classroom still smells like dry-erase marker and the orange peels the third period kids leave in the recycling bin, and none of it is yours, not really, but you have been Mrs. Odom's replacement inside this heavy Queens body for eleven days now and you are done with him tonight. Done with the knee that clicks on the stairs. Done with the ex-wife's lawyer calling about the co-op. Done, mostly, with how good this man is — how he grades papers at the kitchen table at midnight in his undershirt, patient as a saint, and how that patience has started to feel like a room with no other door in it. You sit on his bed, in his cheap apartment, and you open the laptop and go to the page with the wheel, and you tell yourself it is only curiosity, the way you have told yourself that four hundred and two times before. You spin because he cannot surprise you anymore. You spin because somewhere it is still early evening and somebody is about to be worth finding out.

The wheel stops and there is no in-between, no falling, no light to travel through — one second you are looking down at a stack of ungraded quizzes and the next you are looking down at a bedspread the color of wheat, close enough to smell the detergent in it, your — his — forehead an inch above the fabric, weight balanced on two old knees that were, half a breath ago, mid-straighten. The prayer had ended too soon and this body knows it, some instinct in the muscles pulling him back down before the man inside had decided to. You feel the golf-ball click in his left hip. You feel a mouth that had been smiling go still around unsaid words.

And then it comes, all at once and in pieces, the way it always does: not memory so much as weather.

The bedspread first — cheap hotel cotton, not his own bed at all, and with it the whole reason he is kneeling on a bedspread instead of his own carpet: three nights a month, sometimes four, he takes the overnight shuttle bus service to Vegas from the Inland Empire depot to see Denise, who used to be nobody to him and is now, after thirty-one years, a woman he calls twice a week and visits like a man keeping a promise nobody made him make. Not his wife. Old and unfinished business, older than the ring on his hand, and Denise never asked him to keep coming and he never explained to Angela why he still does. He does not think of it as betrayal. He thinks of it as unfinished, which is worse, and he prays about it in the halfhearted way a man prays about a thing he has already decided not to stop doing.

The t-shirt against your back gives you the morning — Angela's kitchen in the pale light, the good coffee, her hand flat on his chest before he left for the airport shuttle, not suspicious, just tired, thirty years of a marriage grown comfortable enough that neither of them says the hard thing anymore. His hands, dressing: undershirt over the shoulders that ache going up but not coming down, cargo shorts because Denise's room runs warm, the wedding band that never comes off because taking it off would be admitting something he has decided isn't true.

The nightstand clock gives you the job — thirty-one years on the casino floor, four a.m. badge-ins at the employee entrance on Flamingo, counting a cage drawer under fluorescent light while the tourists upstairs were still losing money from the night before. Retired eleven months now. His body remembers standing on tile for eight-hour shifts more than it remembers sitting on a porch, even though the porch is what he does every day now, coffee going cold, waiting to feel retired and not quite managing it.

The floor under your knees gives you his daughter, thirty-four, a phone call last week he still hasn't returned, some small failure he is carrying and doesn't have language for.

His body, underneath all of it, is honest: sixty-five and average, strong enough in the shoulders from decades of lifting cash trays, a hip that complains on stairs, cholesterol numbers his doctor has opinions about, hands that know how to count money fast without looking and to hold a coffee mug loose and easy on a porch he hasn't earned the right to enjoy yet. Freckles dust his nose under fingers that go there without thinking, an old childhood habit of touching his own face to make sure he's still in it.

You come back up out of the bow slow, the way he would have, forehead lifting off the bedspread, and you catch your reflection ghosted in the dark hotel window — Charles Renfroe's face, freckled, unbothered, a stranger's marriage and a stranger's unfinished woman both folded into it now like items in a suitcase you didn't pack. You turn your hand over in the lamp light, the wedding band catching gold, and you say, quiet, to no one in the empty room:

"Denise is gonna have to wait."