Clarence Whitfield

Marcus Odom's hands are good hands. They know a plane's weight, the give of fir against a chisel. For eleven minutes I have sat on the edge of his bed in the dark in Seattle, the clock on his stove glowing green through the open door, and I have looked at those hands and felt nothing at all. That is what sent me back. Nothing is wrong with him. The ache in his left shoulder is honest, the lazy eye catches the streetlight, and tonight a drawer in his kitchen held a tape measure, a dead man's name on its case, and I held it and felt the whole grief of someone else's father and felt nothing of my own. I want to be surprised. So I open the page. The wheel turns. Marcus's thumb is on the glass and I tell it to go.

Blue light on one cheek. Phone six inches from my face, the mattress tilted under my hip, my thumb stopped mid-scroll. Then it starts again, faster and steadier than his ever did, flicking past everything he had paused on. I do not know what any of it is. My eyes are dry; I have forgotten to blink, and I do, hard.

The sheet is cotton, worn thin, cool under my forearm. It gives me a woman first. Not her face, her voice from another room, saying a name, Clarence, the way you say it to bring a man in from the yard. Forty years old, that voice. Warm. Then the flash goes and leaves a taste behind, like pennies.

The wedding finger itches. My thumb finds it: bare skin, a groove, a band's ghost. Under the thumb, the memory is a Saturday in a courthouse hallway with a pen on a chain, and a relief so large it felt like falling. He signed. He went out to the car and sat with both hands on the wheel until the sun moved off the dashboard. He did not hate her. That is the part that had no place to go.

My leg is moving. Under the blanket, the right knee is bouncing, a small steady tick against the mattress, and I could not stop it if I tried. It is how he waited at his daughter's recitals, at the hospital, at the bank the morning the sale of the company cleared and the number on the screen made him go quiet. He has more money than he has ever known what to do with. He bought a house with a deep porch and sits on it with coffee mid-morning, the neon from the back alley bleeding through the trees. Tonight he could not sleep, so he is here, lit.

The black T-shirt, soft from a hundred washes, sticks at the collar. I feel him pull it over his head that evening, thinking nothing. Under my palm on the pillow there is a smell, cedar and something like sage, and a bundle of dried herbs hangs in the dark above the nightstand. He tied it himself at the full moon. He told no one, not his daughter, not the woman in the courthouse hallway. At the window he says small words to the moon and feels held. It is the only thing he never had to explain, and it opens in me like a door in a house I have no right to.

His chest is wide and tired. Sixty-two years sit in the knees, in the low back, a quiet fatigue like water in the bones. He quit the drinking years ago; the want sometimes still arrives at five o'clock, polite, unwelcome. He quit cigarettes before that. My fingers remember the shape of a pack anyway, the tap against the heel of a hand.

I put the phone face down. The room goes dark, and in the dark I lift my hand.

Brown, broad, the knuckles gone a little thick. The pale band of skin at the ring finger. I turn it over, palm up, and the lines in it are his and nobody else's, and I am inside them.

I look up, and I say, low, in a voice that is deeper than I expected, "Clarence." It sounds like someone calling me in from the yard.

How long do I get? The bouncing leg doesn't know. Neither do I.