Dale Pruski

You are leaving Russell Dunleavy because of the cold. Not the weather. His wife's side of the bed, which is made, and which he has not slept on in the minute and a half you have worn him. His knees ache on the edge of the mattress. His moustache tastes of toothpaste. He has a quiet house in Seattle and a good pension and a mild, kind face, and you sit in the dark with the laptop lit against his dimples and understand that nothing in him wants anything. You want. He is a clean glass of water and you are thirsty for something with a bottom to it. The cursor is already on the wheel.

You press it and the house goes out.

Heat first. Then weight, a lot of it, settled forward onto your chest and belly, the mattress pushing back up under you. Your face is mashed into a pillow that smells of someone else's hair oil. One arm hangs off the bed and the blood has left it; the fingers are thick and cold and asleep. Your breath was ragged a second ago and is now even. You did that. The arm draws itself up, the body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold on your chest like a man laid out. He has never slept like this. You can feel that the body doesn't know how.

A streetlight pushes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the blanket. Somewhere outside, a diesel idles and ticks.

The shirt comes first. It is a thin dark T-shirt, soft from a thousand washes, and the collar is damp at the back of your neck. It gives you a morning: his thumbs working buttons on a red plaid flannel in a bathroom with bad light, sleeves rolled twice, the way his father rolled them. He was tired in a way sleep doesn't touch. He tucked the gray undershirt flat over his belly and looked at himself and didn't mind it, much. Then the cap, bill bent in his fist, and the keys.

The sheet is under your palm. Cheap cotton, a motel's, a rented week. The memory is a woman's voice on a phone, tinny, and three other voices behind it, children, one laughing, one not. Ex-wife. Her name is Renee. She says *you missed it* and he says *I was in Amarillo*, and the jaw clenches, here, now, in your face, the hinge of it hard as a fist. You unclench it. It comes back by itself. That is what his body does when he isn't thinking.

Your left hand slides over the blanket and finds the ring finger. There's no ring, only a band of skin gone paler than the rest, smooth, a little dented. The feeling that comes up is not grief exactly. It is the habit of reaching to turn a ring that isn't there, eleven years of it, and a sum, a number he carries like a stone in a boot: debt, tens of thousands, the truck, the lawyers, the braces. A church basement. Folding chairs. His voice, rough, saying a prayer over coffee that he mostly meant.

The mattress sags and your back finds the springs. A pain runs low along the spine, a trucker's pain, ten hours of vibration stored in the bone. Your knees are fine. Your forearms are thick and strong, and your hands know the weight of a fifth-wheel pin and a tire thumper without being asked. You flex them and they answer.

You lift your right hand into the streetlight and turn it over. Palm, creases, grease worked into them for good. The skin pale where the ring was.

You look up, past it, and say, quietly, in a voice that is low and gravelly and not yours: "All right, Dale. Let's see what you've got."

Your jaw is already clenching. You wonder how long you get him, an hour, a year, whether the wanting will come back before the sun does.