Curtis Boudreaux

You are standing in a Detroit kitchen in the middle of the night, in Andre Whitfield's body, and you can feel that it works. It is twenty-three years old and has never once complained. The knees don't talk. The shoulders sit where you put them. There is a cleft in the chin that your tongue keeps finding. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you have asked it for nothing it couldn't give.

That's the trouble. The body is perfect and you are not satisfied with it. In his refrigerator light you stand there with a glass of water, and you catch yourself wanting something heavier than young. You want a man who has already finished a lot of things. A man with a wife asleep somewhere, and dirt in the creases of his hands. You aren't going to say why. You have the page open and your thumb is over the wheel before the water is gone. It starts to turn. You set the glass down, and you are not here.

You are face-down. Sheets under your cheek, cool and damp where the breath has been. One arm hangs off the mattress and the fingers brush carpet. A seam of streetlight stands in the curtains. His breathing has been ragged, and you smooth it into one long even pull. You draw the arm up and roll onto your back. Your hands fold on your chest, a way he has never slept in his life, and you did it without choosing to.

Then the shirt gets to you. It's a thin cotton one, worn soft, and it lies against your ribs, and the first memory comes up through it like water through a floor. It's the morning, years of mornings. The denim shirt goes on last, one sleeve and then the other, his left hand always fumbling the cuff button because the ring catches. The work pants stand stiff with dried mud by the door. He steps into them one leg at a time, standing on the cold boards. He is sixty, and he sits down to lace the boots because bending hurts his lower back. The back hurts now, a dull hinge low in the spine. You feel it against the mattress.

The sheet is under your fingers, and the sheet is his wife. She is not in the bed, she is gone to her sister's, and the pillow on her side still smells of cocoa butter. He has slept badly since the house went quiet. Two children grown and gone to other cities. He calls them on Sundays and talks mostly about weather, because weather is what he can say. Under the thumb of your left hand, the ring turns. It is warm and a little loose. It comes with a flash of the day it was put on: a church basement, fried fish, his own hands shaking so badly she had to steady them. A second woman sits behind that one, the ex-wife, and nothing hurts there anymore. Only a kindness, a long-ago Christmas, a casserole dish he still hasn't returned.

Your hands won't be still. They are restless even folded. The fingers drum, flex, pick at the hem. They want a fence post, a gate latch, a wrench. Memory runs through them: the gate at the end of the field with the light going orange, the chain swinging, the cold of the steel. Forty acres of it, and the money is more than he ever lets on. He drives a truck with a cracked dash. A million, two, sits in land and in an account he never looks at. He hates how people go quiet about it. He wears the same mud on purpose.

There's the tattoo, pulled tight over the breastbone: an anchor, bold black lines gone soft, red faded to rose. He got it at nineteen and was drunk. He drinks big only once or twice a month now, and sleeps it off like a felled tree. Tonight was not one of those nights. You can feel that his head is clear.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. Freckles run across the wrists, and the knuckles are wide. You turn them over. The palms are creased and hard, and the ring is still there. They are not yours and they are yours. You sit up, locs falling heavy across your shoulders, and you say into the dark room, "Well. Look at you."

How long, you wonder. The wheel is still there behind your eyes, patient. You open and close the hand.