Curtis Haldane

You are leaving Michael Brennan because of the mop bucket. Not the bucket itself: the sound of it, the gray water sloshing against the plastic lip for the forty-sixth year of his knees. Less than a minute inside him, and you stood in a stairwell in New York at mid-morning with the handle in your fists and felt every pound he carries on the joints he walks on. You had paid for a man and been handed a chore. Something else under that, which you will not say: you passed a window and a pane of glass gave you back his freckles, and you did not want to be looked at by anyone who looked like that. So you let the handle fall. It clangs on the concrete as you go.

Rain. Steady and warm, loud on the shelter roof. The board overhead says 3 MIN and you are already stepping out into the runoff, hood shoved back, face turned up into it. The water is on your forehead, your eyelids, your open mouth. You stand in it like a man who has not been cold in a long time.

Then the jacket, wet leather, heavy on your shoulders, creaking when you breathe. Something comes up through it: a thrift store, a woman holding it against his chest, saying it makes him look like someone who leaves. His ex-wife. He kept it six years after she left. It still smells faintly of her car.

Your right hand finds the pocket and there is a pen in it. Your thumb clicks it without being asked, click, click, and the call center comes up whole: the gray cubicle wall, a woman crying about a bill, his voice saying "I understand, ma'am" a hundred times a day and meaning it ninety. Under that, a church basement, folding chairs, a man's hand on his shoulder. He quit drinking there. He sits in the third row. He prays badly and keeps doing it.

The jeans are heavy with water and cling at the thighs. Skinny fat: the softness at the belly, the thin arms, the knees that are fine. Nothing hurts. After Michael, nothing hurting is almost shocking. The shoes squelch. Inside them, his toes remember the long walk to this stop every night, the savings account he checks like a pulse, forty-some thousand dollars, a little put away, for nothing in particular.

And Neil. You wore Neil, briefly, in Phoenix, up a turbine in the wind. Now the friendship comes up through the tattoo, the black tribal ink on his inner forearm, itching under wet sleeve. They got drunk at nineteen and went in together. Neil's was worse. Neil laughed the whole time. You know Neil's kitchen from the inside, and now you know this man's phone number for him, the one he calls on bad nights, and Neil always picks up. You know exactly what you did in Neil's house. This man never will.

The M of his hairline is cold under the rain. The stubble drips. Somewhere the bus is a sound.

You lift your hand and turn it over. The ink, the pale palm, the pen still in the fingers. Rain pools in the cup of it.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, to no one. "Okay, Curtis."

It is how long you get that you wonder, with the water running into his mouth: whether this wanting stays quiet, or whether it comes back by the time the doors fold open.