Dale Hutchins

Walter Kasprzak's knees have been wrong since the moment you got them, and that is not the reason, but it is where you start counting. Fifty-six years of a body that argues with stairs. The gatehouse chair has a crack in the vinyl that has already learned your shape. You were Walter for less than a minute, and in that minute you found a once-broken nose that whistles on every inhale, a thermos of coffee gone cold, and a flat ache of nothing. Nothing came to find you in him. The lot out the window is empty and bright, the middle of a Thursday morning, and a security guard guards a gate that nobody has ever come to. You thought a man like that would hold something. A weight. He holds a pen cap he has chewed flat. So your thumb is already on the site, on the wheel, and the wheel is already turning, and the click of it sounds like the one thing in the room that is alive.

Then the kitchen.

The music comes first: a tinny piano, looping back to its first bar, and the phone is falling off a shoulder that is not Walter's, and your hand, his hand, catches it mid-loop. The pen has stopped on the second digit of a number. It does not start again. Linoleum under your feet, a window full of white morning, coffee gone to a ring in the mug.

You stand there at the counter, and the room starts to give him up, through touch only.

The shirt first. It is soft, washed thin across the shoulders, and it clings under the arms where the day is already warm. A flash that is not yours: a hamper, a Tuesday, him pulling this same shirt out because the others are worse, and the thought *it's only the register, nobody looks at a shirt under the vest.* Left sleeve first, always. The right arm finding the hole by itself. He does not think about getting dressed anymore, and neither does the body: it knows the buttons of the vest, the lanyard over the head, the beard smoothed once with the flat of a palm on the way out.

The counter edge is cold laminate against your hip. Under your fingers the envelope has a soft fold, and the flash comes: the insurance, a denial, a number he has to read to three different people. It tastes like shame and tired patience. Cheap pen, blue, the clicker worn.

Your right hand has gone to his pocket without asking. A lighter, a Zippo with the hinge loose, and the thumb flips the lid, snaps it, flips it, a sound like a habit older than the divorce. Smoke comes up through the memory of it, a pack a day, the back step, the cough that settles under the ribs every morning. And the ring finger: pale band of skin where gold used to be. When your thumb finds it, a woman's voice arrives, her laugh across a different kitchen, years ago, and then the long quiet when she put the key on this counter. Carol. He still sets two mugs out sometimes, and puts one back.

The keys by the toaster jingle when your elbow shifts. Diner on Main, closed now; he ate there every Friday with his mother after Mass, and the stoplight still blinks over the empty booths. Eleven dollars an hour and a rosary in the glove box. A drink or two at night, then the second one longer than the first.

The body is skinny in the arms and soft at the middle, the back stiff from standing lanes. The music loops again.

You lift his hand and turn it over. The tan line, the nicotine-yellow of the first two fingers, the lighter still pinched there.

You look up, to the window, to nobody.

"Well, Dale," you say, in his voice, rough with smoke. "Let's see how long you last."

The music starts over. You do not hang up.