Curtis Rademaker

You are standing in Walter Donnelly's kitchen with his cold coffee in your hand, and you have already decided.

It's nothing he did. He is a fine body. The knees are bad on the stairs, but the patients like him, and the woman on Tulip Street calls him sweet. This morning he sat with her through the gray before the sun while she asked him twice who he was. The second time he said *Walter*, and she said, *No, I mean who are you*, and his mouth had nothing to say. You were in there behind it and you had nothing either.

So the phone is on the counter with the page open, the wheel painted on it, and your thumb is his thumb, thick at the knuckle. Fifty-eight years of someone else's weather is in his shoulders. You pay. You spin.

Foam on your lip. Mint, hot and sharp. The tap is running, and your mouth is full of a brush that is already moving. Then it stops, mid-stroke. The bristles sit against a tooth and you hold still, because there is no travel and no warning, only a different floor, cold tile under bare feet, and a hum of water.

You start again on the other side, slower, working the back molars. Your jaw is somebody's jaw. The goatee is wet, and it is a strange thing to feel hair on your chin that is joined to your mustache. You lean into the counter, and its edge presses a line across your palm. You rinse once, and then twice.

The ring is on the left hand, a plain band, loose with water. When you turn the tap, the metal knocks the faucet, and it comes up whole: her laugh in a truck cab, a church parking lot, and him sliding it on thin fingers in a hot room with a fan going. Pride, and under it a fear of dropping it. It is his and it goes through you like weather.

The shirt is old cotton, soft at the collar, thinned at the shoulders. Pulling at it, you get a sleeve and then the whole of yesterday's dressing, the same shirt left on the chair overnight. He pushed one arm through in the dark so as not to wake her, and thought about the Alvarez lawn, the edging, the trailer hitch that sticks. Then the pants, with grass dried into the knees and the smell of two-stroke gas deep in the cloth. His thighs know how to crouch. His hands know the pull of a starter cord before there is a cord.

The tattoo is inside the forearm, lettering you read slowly: a name, a date. You touch it and your thumb finds it raised under the light. A hospital hallway, a green plastic chair, a nurse saying *I'm sorry* the soft way. He cried in the truck with the air on high so no one would hear. The grief is old and worn smooth like a stair rail. You take your thumb off it.

He is skinny and quick, strong in the wrists, empty in the stomach, and the room smells of soap and mildew and the toothpaste he buys cheap. Somewhere in the house a floor creaks. Someone is moving, someone who is his, and the knowing sits in your chest like a held breath.

You stand the brush bristles-up in the cup, out of the gray water it has always sat in.

You look at his hands. You turn them over. The wedding band catches the bulb light. Then you lift your eyes to the mirror, to green eyes, and say, quietly, "Good morning, Curtis."

And under it the question comes back, as it always does: how long you get, and when the wanting turns over again.