Curtis Leon Aldridge

Alvin Pettiford's knees tell you first, the left one worst, a bad hinge in a heavy man. It is the middle of the night in Philadelphia and you are sitting on the edge of his bed in his undershirt, the foreman's belly warm against your forearms, the phone lit in your hand. The wheel is on the screen. You are not unhappy in him. Yesterday you stood on the line at six and a man called you Mr. Pettiford, and nothing in you answered. All day you waited for his life to feel like a coat, and it only ever felt like a coat. You put your thumb down on the wheel because you wanted to be someone whose name you didn't have to learn to answer to.

Then you are on your side in the dark, and the blue is on your cheek.

The phone is six inches from your face. The thumb is stopped mid-scroll, and it starts again before you decide anything, quicker and steadier than a thumb this old has any right to be. The mattress holds you. The sheet is cool along your shin. Your own blink comes late, and you let it.

The shirt is the first thing. Long sleeves, soft with washing, pulled to the elbow by sleeping. Cotton rubs the inside of your wrist and it opens: a Tuesday, the same shirt thrown on over nothing before the late bus, his mother's voice on the phone saying *you work too hard, Curtis*, and him laughing, the dimples cutting in, because it was a true thing said gently. Twenty-six years on the floor. He took the nights because the nights were quiet and the dying tended to happen in them, and someone ought to be awake who wasn't afraid of it.

Your thumb flicks. Your knuckles want to crack, and you let them, one hand over the other, a pop that goes all the way up the forearm. It feels like relief. It feels like thirty years of habit, and through it comes a smell of cigarettes he quit on a stairwell landing, in a March, in a rage, because a patient's daughter said *you smell like him*. The craving is still down in the muscle, patient, buried.

You are strong. The arm under you is thick, the shoulder carries its own weight without asking, and when you shift, your back remembers lifting other people's fathers a thousand times and says so quietly along the spine. The head is cool where the hair has gone, and the beard is a short rasp against the pillowcase.

The sheets are the gray ones he bought on sale and was ridiculously proud of. The wood of the nightstand is under your elbow. You press your palm to it and get nothing, only a lamp and a clock, and the quiet of a man who goes to bed alone and has made his peace with it. No one is coming up the stairs. Somewhere past the curtain a Brooklyn street is wet and orange.

You turn the phone over. You look at your hands, brown, broad, the nails clipped short for work. They are steady. They have held a great many other hands at the end. You turn them over and the palms are rough in the places where a life leaves its mark.

Then you look up, into the dark, and say it out loud, in a voice lower than any you've had:

"Well. Hello, Curtis."

The dimples come without your asking. You wonder how long they will be yours, and whether the same face is waiting in the morning, or whether the wanting will start again before the lamp has cooled.