Colm Reilly Nowak

Walter Brennan's knees hurt on the stairs, and that is as close to a reason as you will give yourself. Ten minutes in him and you already know the house: the hallway runner that slides, the thermostat set to a number he would defend, the reading glasses folded on the kitchen counter. Sixty-three years sit in the lower back like a bag of wet sand. You stand in the dark with his gray beard under your palm and the whole sleeping house ticking around you, and the truth is that nothing is wrong with him. He works. He is only a man who has to be the manager of a store on Monday, and you stood at the top of those stairs and felt Monday coming like weather. So you sit down at the laptop in his study, and the wheel is already turning before you have admitted you wanted it.

The wheel clicks and slows, and you are gone.

Cold air on your face. Cotton pressed against your cheek and a stale-bed smell, vape sweetness underneath it. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains, and somewhere below the window a train goes over the tracks, iron on iron, a long shudder through the frame of the building. Your chest is flat against the mattress. One arm hangs off the edge, the blood gone to pins in it. Your breath is ragged and then, in one pull, it is not. Nineteen years old, and the lungs are enormous and easy.

The sheet under your face is rough, washed too many times, and with it comes a Sunday: a girl's laugh in this same room, her foot against his shin, the two of them eating cereal off the bed at noon. It is his feeling, not yours, and it has a hole in it the shape of her. Recent. Still raw. He sleeps on his stomach because she used to take the whole back of him for her own, and now there is no one to keep it from.

The hanging hand is cold, and the knuckles brush the bed frame. Ink on the back of it, a small crooked thing, and the memory comes with a hot flush of shame: a friend's kitchen, a borrowed needle, a dare, laughter, and the next morning in the bathroom mirror knowing it was wrong and permanent. He has worn long sleeves over it for a year, and it sits there still.

You draw the arm up. The body rolls over easily, all that muscle answering before you ask, shoulders and stomach and thighs trained by lifting boxes eight hours a day. You lie on your back and fold the hands across your chest. He has never once slept this way. The shirt is a gray work polo, soft at the collar, still smelling of the warehouse. Pulling it straight, you get the morning he put it on: the bus, the cold, the safety vest stiff on its hook, the scanner strapped to his wrist like a watch he hates. Aisle after aisle of racking, a forklift beeping somewhere you can't see, the clock he watches until his eyes sting. Under it all, the plain pride of a kid who is good at it. His feet know the concrete. His back knows the weight of forty pounds lifted correctly.

Under your fingers, a small gold medal on a chain at his neck, warm from his skin. A grandmother's kitchen, a rosary, Mass on Sundays that he has let slide since the breakup. He still crosses himself in the dark when the sirens go by. He is scraping by, and he knows the exact number in his account, and it fits in his head like a stone. He quit drinking in the spring because of what it did to his temper, and nobody knows how close that came to ending things for good.

The jaw under your thumb is smooth and the chin has a deep cleft. The face is his father's, that cleft; a man who left, and who is in the mirror each morning anyway.

You lift both hands in the streetlight and turn them over. The tattoo, the scarred knuckle, the fingers that know how to grip. Yours now. For how long you cannot say. The wanting is already stirring somewhere underneath, small and patient, asking how long this one will last.

You look up, into the dark, and say quietly, "Hello, Colm. Let's see what you were."