Connor Thomas Keegan

You leave Prakash because of the dirt. It has gotten into the creases of his knuckles and under the nails, and no amount of scrubbing at the sink in his kitchen has shifted it. You have been him for less than a minute, and already the whole morning of him is a smell: cut grass, two-stroke oil, a goatee that itches when he sweats. Standing in his driveway with his phone in a hand that is not yours, you think of the other one. The one seven spins back, the principal in Seattle, heavy and gray, with the pale patches on his hands. You wore Martin Joseph Keegan for less than a minute too. You remember his kitchen, a folded note on the counter, a name written at the top in a hand you did not choose. Connor. You never knew who that was. You know now what you want to find out. Prakash's thumb finds the wheel.

The organ stops. The room stands with a long wooden sound, and you come up half a beat behind them, in a coat that is not yours, with a folded paper in your left hand and your eyes on the floor. Nobody turns around.

Your hands go to the coat and smooth it down. The buttons are there under your fingers, and you learn them one at a time.

The wool is heavy and damp at the shoulders, and a memory comes up through it. It is a borrowed coat, from a friend's closet, because his own is at the cleaners and the funeral came too fast. He stood in a hallway in his socks, put one arm in and then the other, and felt the shoulders sit too wide on him. In his feeling the apology is already there, a small shame at being outfitted by somebody else.

The paper is in your fingers, creased down the middle. A woman's face is printed on the front, and the name under it makes something in his chest drop. Her laugh comes with it, an old kitchen, an argument about a lease. She is the ex. She was never really gone. His thumb goes to his own cheek, the freckled skin, a habit, and finds it smooth. He shaved this morning, close, standing at the mirror trying to look like a man who could stand at the back of a church.

Under the coat is a white shirt. It holds the stiffness of a drawer, ironed on the kitchen table with the board he never puts away. His arms went through it sleeve by sleeve while he thought of her name. The belt is next, the buckle cold on his belly. He is soft there, a teacher's body that sits all day and eats in the car. His knees ache a little from standing. His feet are in black shoes that pinch at the little toe, bought for a different funeral, his grandmother's.

Then the other one comes, the one you know. His father. Martin, in a driveway, his hands pale in patches, saying nothing, and the boy at nineteen saying nothing back. It is why he stands at the back. It is why he is sober, by decision, and why he prays now in a plain, stubborn way that he is not sure anyone hears. You have been inside that father. You know the house he went home to. You know what you did there in the minute you had him.

You lift your hands and turn them over. They are pale and freckled at the knuckles, with chalk worn into the creases, his hands. You look up toward the front of the chapel, where the window is bright, and you say, quietly, so only you can hear it:

"Hello, Connor."

You do not know how long you get him. The wanting is already there, small and patient, underneath the hymn.