Dennis Rutkowski

You are twelve minutes into Jesse Kowalczyk and already it is wrong. The Pittsburgh house is asleep around you. You are standing at a stranger's refrigerator in a soldier's body, quick and light and twenty-four, and the whole kitchen is too easy. Nothing in him resists. You open the cold door and the light falls on his hands, and you know what you wanted was never ease. You wanted weight, something that had to be carried, a man who has been somewhere. Jesse has been nowhere yet. You close the door on the light, go to the laptop, and the wheel is already turning under your finger.

Then the fork stops.

It is halfway up and heavy with rice, and the kitchen arrives all at once: a pendant lamp humming over your head, a counter edge pressing the belt line of a belly you did not have a second ago, and your coat still on, shoulders warm inside it. Your jaw is open. You close it. The taste is cumin and something burnt-sweet, and it is cold in the middle.

The jacket first. Nylon, slick, a cuff of elastic tight on the wrist, and the zipper pull against your sternum. Touch it and you get the morning: his thick fingers working the zipper at the hall closet while someone down the hall called out about the porch light, and his answer, I got it, Maureen. He was always the one who had it. The knit cuff is gone soft from his thumb worn over it again and again.

The polo, green, damp at the collar. A church picnic, a long table, two small children running in the grass behind him, a daughter's hair in a braid and a boy with a scraped chin, and a feeling in his chest so wide it hurt. Grown now. Phones, not picnics.

The counter under your palm is cold stone. It gives you a smaller memory, nearly shameful: standing here at this hour on purpose, eating alone, because the container is the only thing he is allowed to be greedy about. The doctor said so. The drink is years gone, the cigarettes too, though your lungs still remember them like a house remembers a smell. Under the ribs, a dull ache. Knees that complain. A body that has settled into being sixty-one and does not argue.

Your hand rises on its own and runs over the scalp. Smooth, warm, a little oily. Fifty years of that gesture comes up with it. A girl before Maureen, Colleen, laughing at the first thinning, her fingers there instead of his. He still thinks of her sometimes, harmless, like a window he passes.

In the dark glass across the room, the streetlights burn far off, orange and red. A rosary hangs in him somewhere, a Sunday habit. He has about forty thousand dollars put away and thinks it is not enough.

You set the fork down. The wedding band is cold against the plastic. You turn the hand over, broad and freckled and entirely yours, and lift your eyes.

"Well," you say, in his low voice. "Hello."

You wonder how long this one lasts.