Cody Wayne Pritchard

You are standing in a hotel laundry room before sunrise, in a body that is sixty and aching in both knees, and the sheets in your arms are still warm from the dryer. You stand there with your face in the heat of them. Rubén's thumbs have the pale patches on them, and you have watched those patches for under a minute. They are smooth as wax, and you keep looking.

It isn't that he's bad. He is a quiet man and the body is gentle. But the quiet has a floor in it, and you hit the floor. Four hundred towels. A radio somewhere playing a song in Spanish you almost know. You were supposed to feel something in him and all you feel is the list of rooms. Something in you has already left, and the sheets are only warm.

So you go to the page with the wheel on it. You pay. You spin.

The wheel clicks down, and then it is gone.

Heat. Wet, heavy air, the kind that sits in the lungs like a hand. You are standing with your left arm out, fingers curled around a two-by-four, upright, and the weight of it leans into your palm. Your right hand is already coming up to the nailer and has stopped there, half a motion. Concrete under both boots. The red hose lies coiled at your feet. Your heart is going quick and steady.

You do one motion wrong. You feel the wrongness and set it right, slowly. Then you check the next, and the next.

The shirt comes first. Flannel, soft from a hundred washes, and a thread of it catches in the crook of your elbow as you move. Then there is a bedroom with the window unit rattling and a woman's voice from the bathroom saying *you're gonna be late, babe,* and his hands, not yours, fumbling the snaps closed one by one, the third one always stubborn. He rolls the sleeves twice, to the forearm, because the ink itches under cuffs. The jeans stiff with dried mud at the knee. He sits on the bed edge to lace the boots and his head is dull and thick from last night, three, no, six beers on the back step, and he promised her three. The ache sits behind his eyes. He is ashamed of it, and the shame has a familiar groove worn in it.

The belt weighs on your hip, leather gone black and smooth from his body. You rest your thumb on the hammer handle and a whole year opens: his first week framing, a foreman who called him *kid,* the pride of a wall standing square. The pencil behind your ear isn't there. Something yellow is clipped in your hair, and when you touch it, a plastic barrette, hers, and he put it there to keep the hair off his face. He forgot it was hers. The tenderness is so big in his chest it nearly knocks you.

The stud under your hand is warm, rough, with a little sap-bead at the edge. The beard is thick against your collar. The unibrow pulls down when you squint at the sun. Your shoulders are strong and sore and twenty-nine, and your back is tight where he slept wrong. Your hands know where the nailer sits without you looking.

You lift your right hand and look at it. Nicks, a split knuckle, a ridge of callus, the anchor and the faded rose crawling up the forearm. Turn it over. Palm up, it is somebody's, and now it is yours.

You look up at the cul-de-sac, the sun coming through the pines, and say, low, "Well. Morning."

The wall holds steady. You wonder how long it will.