Cole Bertrand

You have been a priest for sixty seconds and it is unbearable.

Not the collar — the collar is fine, the collar is just cloth. It's the stillness. You are standing in the vestibule of a rectory in Phoenix, noon light coming flat and white through the security glass, and this body — 5'8", muscular, blond, brown eyes, thirty-some years of discipline poured into it — is holding itself the way a held breath holds itself. Somebody left a laminated funeral schedule on the table by the door and you have been staring at it since you arrived, because staring at it is the only thing this body wants to do. You did not choose a priest for the stillness. You chose him fast, off the wheel, the way you choose most of them, and you have spent the full minute of his life discovering that a minute is exactly as long as you can stand being someone who has already decided everything about himself. There's a rosary looped over the doorknob and even that feels like it's watching you.

You do not decide to leave him so much as notice that you already have — hand on the phone, thumb already moving, vessel.cards loading before the minute's even up. Spin.

—

The couch takes your weight before you understand you have weight again — lower this time, wider, tipped back into cushions gone soft in the middle from years of exactly this. There's a can in your hand, half-crushed at the base where fingers have been gripping and re-gripping it out of habit rather than thirst, and it's warm, which tells you it's been in that hand a while. Your mouth is open. There's a dryness at the back of your throat that isn't yours yet. On the screen in front of you a football stalls out mid-play, PASS TO 10 YD LINE hanging in green, and some part of this body that is not you yet has already stopped watching the score and started watching the ball, like the score never mattered, like the ball was always the whole thing.

Your thumb finds the volume rocker on the remote without your permission, precise, unhurried, the kind of precision a person's hand keeps even when the rest of him is three beers past caring. Second replay. He slept through the goal the first time. That specificity arrives like a slap — not a name yet, not a face, just the fact of missing something and it not mattering, because there'll be a replay, there's always a replay in this house on a Monday afternoon when other people are at work.

—

The shirt is what opens him. Not this shirt — he's in a soft grey tee now, sleep-creased at the shoulder — but the memory the couch cushions carry anyway, worn into the fabric of the whole room: a khaki work shirt, salt-stiff at the collar, going on this same body forty-some times a week, left arm first because the right shoulder clicks when it's cold, has clicked like that since a trench wall came down easy and slow on him three years back in a dig outside Natchitoches, nothing broken, just something that never quite sat right again. Cole Bertrand. The name comes with the shirt's memory, the way his own name always announces itself through his clothes rather than through him, like even he has to be reminded.

The trowel is a separate flash entirely — leather-wrapped handle, worn to the shape of his palm, and it's not even here, it's forty minutes east of here in a site bag by a screen box, and still your hand remembers it: the weight forward, the flick at the wrist that clears loose dirt off a feature without disturbing the line beneath it, a motion so practiced it has stopped being a motion and become a fact of the hand. Kneeling in full sun for six, eight hours. Knees that ache going up stairs now. Forearms two shades darker than the underside of his arms, a farmer's tan with a straight, cruel edge at the sleeve.

The can gives you the rest, because a can is a small enough thing to hold a whole year. He quit for a while — actually quit, six sober months once, after Marisol left and took Etienne with her to her mother's in Baton Rouge and he understood, lying awake in the shotgun house listening to the streetcar line two blocks over, that he had been drinking at the exact rate his life had stopped requiring anything of him. He got better. Not fixed — better. Takes the little blue pill every morning that the doctor in Mid-City prescribed him, keeps the appointment every six weeks even when it costs him a half day of pay he can't spare, because the alternative is the flat grey mornings he remembers from before, the ones where getting up felt like an argument he was losing. He sees Etienne every other weekend. Four years old. Doesn't remember his own diaper years, doesn't remember any of this, just knows his daddy digs up old things and that's the coolest job of any daddy at daycare.

The lighter's in his shorts pocket, dead against your hip, and it doesn't even need a flame to give something up: his thumb rolling the wheel absently, a whole conversation's worth of not-smoking-in-front-of-his-son, a whole year's worth of Marisol saying she couldn't watch him kill himself slow anymore, said it kind, not cruel, which was somehow worse. A pack a day. Down from a pack and a half. He counts that as progress because progress is the only kind of victory he's had lately.

Under it all, the body: twenty-five, still young in the joints except where the trench taught it otherwise, average build going a little soft at the middle from beer and grief and not enough to do in a New Orleans August besides sit under a box fan. The hairline already retreating hard at both temples, a fact he catches in mirrors and flinches from, a small vanity in a man who otherwise doesn't have many left. Hazel eyes heavy right now, lashes still damp with the particular sleep of the exhausted — up before dawn to beat the heat on site, home by two, asleep by three most days whether he means to be or not.

The television throws its light across a face already starting to surface out of sleep on its own timeline, unaware anything in it has been swapped for something else.

—

You look at your hand. It's still around the can, and you turn it, slow, watching the light from the screen slide down along a scar-less, sun-browned forearm gone pale where a watch strap used to sit — he pawned the watch, you understand, sometime last spring, rent being what it is.

You lift your eyes to the room, then past the room, into the lens of whatever's watching, though nothing in this house should be watching anything.

"Guess I missed the play," you say, and your thumb finds the lighter in your pocket before you've told it to.