Daniel Delacroix

You were Frank for less than a minute, and it was long enough. His house was asleep. You stood in a kitchen in New Orleans at the dead middle of the night with a glass of water you had not wanted, and you understood that you had spent the whole minute listening for something. A bigger man's body, a good one, with a bad knee, a soft belly, and a shaved head that felt cool under the palm. You found nothing in it that you needed. You kept thinking of the refrigerator magnet, a child's drawing of a pelican, and of how every drawer in that house belonged to someone who loved him. You put the glass down on the counter. You opened the page with the wheel on it, and your thumb was already moving before you had decided anything.

The wheel clicks. The kitchen goes.

Cold air on your face, an open window, and the smell of hot wax. Your right hand is cupped around a small flame and it is warm, the skin of the palm almost stinging. You are bent forward at the waist. The flame leans toward you, the whole thin body of it, though the draft from the window should push it the other way. Your mouth is already open. A name is in it, said once already, and you say it again, warmer, as if to someone standing close: "Mei." Then you breathe out, and the breath keeps going longer than you thought a chest could hold, and the flame goes out.

Dark. A thread of smoke. Sodium light from the street comes orange through the glass.

Your left leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. The heel of a work boot taps the floorboards, fast, a motor of its own, and the whole weight of you shakes with it, the thick thighs and the belly under the hoodie. You are heavy and solid, and there is muscle under the soft, a hauler's strength. Your lower back aches in a familiar, dull place.

The hoodie comes first. The cotton at the cuff is worn to felt, and when your fingers close on it the memory comes up as a morning rather than a picture. He stood in the hallway at six with the kids' shoes in a heap by the door, and a girlfriend's voice from the bedroom said where's my charger, and he said it's in your bag, it's always in your bag, and he was not angry. He was tired in a way that felt like love. He zipped the hoodie to the sternum, then unzipped it, then zipped it again, because that is what his hands do.

The cargo pants, rough at the knee, hold the day: a floor under a desk, the dust, a gray knot of Ethernet cable behind a filing cabinet, and a woman above him saying are you sure it's the cable? He lay there on his back with a flashlight in his teeth and fixed it in forty seconds and said nothing. Pride, small and private, which he never spent on anybody.

Your fingers find the window sill, flaking paint, and the photograph is there against the glass. Your thumb brushes its edge and he arrives all at once: a girl at nineteen, her laugh, a summer, a bus, a promise neither kept. His old girlfriend. Mei is not the dead one. Mei is the one who is still alive, and the name is something he would not have said to anyone awake. The dead one is in the picture beside her, a man in a collar, his father, and the candle was for him. Somebody had told him at a séance that his father might hear a name said warmly. He had not believed it. He believed it now, with his hand over the flame, and you feel the shame of that belief like a hot coin in your chest.

You never drank, because his father did. You know that without being told. The faith is a quiet one, a pew and a hymnal and a casserole. You know there is money put away, careful money, for the children, and that he lies awake doing the sums.

You lift your hands and look at them. They are broad, the calluses yellow at the pads, short nails, freckles on the backs. You turn them over. The palms are pink from the flame.

Then you look up, and in the black glass of the window a stranger looks back, with a face you have worn for the length of a breath.

"Hi, Frank," you say. It comes out low, almost kind. Your leg is still bouncing under you. You wonder how long you will have this one, and when the wanting will come back.