Denny Aucoin

Marcos Fuentes's shoulder aches from a water heater that fought back all night, and the ache is the first thing that tells you this body is done. Twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes — you counted, the way you always count, though you don't know why you bother — and somewhere in there the plumbing van, the ex-wife's number still saved as MARISOL in his phone, the smell of pipe dope under his nails, all of it stopped being new and started being furniture. You are standing in his kitchen at five in the morning, coffee going cold, and the boredom isn't loud, it's just there, the way a hum is there. You open the site on his phone with his thumbprint, which still works even though it isn't your thumb, and the wheel is waiting the way it's always waiting, patient as a slot machine that never has to hustle. You spin because Marcos has three more days of a bathroom remodel and you have none of his patience for grout, and because the wanting doesn't ask permission, it just arrives, the same way everything else here does.

The wheel turns. Somewhere a long way east, on a street steaming after rain, a man is running out of a prayer he didn't mean to start.

You are on your knees. That's the first fact, before any other — knees on a mattress edge, hands loosely laced, and the weight coming down through them is heavier than Marcos's, softer in the middle, a body that has had a few more years and a few more suppers. There's a t-shirt against your back, thin from washing, and a clock on the nightstand reading a time that means nothing to you yet. You were saying amen. You can feel the shape of it still in the throat, the half-laugh that came before standing — some private joke about how short the prayer had gotten, how little of it was for God and how much was just noise to fill the kneeling — and you rise, and something in the rising stops. You come back down. Forehead to the bedspread. Nobody sees the difference. That's the whole trick of it.

The shirt is what opens first. Thin cotton, a little sour with sleep-sweat, and through it comes a hand — his hand — pulling this exact shirt over this exact head some morning last spring, the smell of the shirt already on him before he put it on, laundry left too long in the machine, and Denny not minding, because Denny doesn't mind much. Denny Aucoin. The name arrives with the shirt, easy as that, no fanfare, just his name the way a man's own name sits in him, unremarkable as breath.

Then the bedspread under your forehead — cheap cotton, a wedding-gift set from somebody's aunt that never got replaced because replacing things wasn't the kind of thing this house did — and that brings the girlfriend. Renee. Not a wife, eleven years of not-a-wife and both of them fine with it by now, her side of the bed still warm two feet away, the shape of her gone to the bathroom already, water running through the wall. A daughter, seven, asleep down the hall in a room that still smells like the paint they never finished. He loves her in the specific, undramatic way of a man who works with his hands all day and comes home smelling of soot no matter how hard he scrubs — Palmolive and creosote, that particular New Orleans damp always underneath it.

The knees carry the ladder work — a hundred flues, a thousand mornings up on somebody's roof with the brush rods threading down into the dark like he's fishing for something that never bites back. His hands, when the memory of them arrives through the laced fingers, already know rope and joint and the particular give of old brick that means a flue's about to surprise you. Thirty-nine years in this dad-bod frame, softened at the belly, strong through the forearms in the way of men who lift for a living and eat like they still burn it off at twenty. Something aches low in the back — always does, mornings — and something else, the shoulder, is fine, better than Marcos's ever was.

The praying itself comes last, through nothing but breath: he does this most mornings, half out of habit, half out of a faith he inherited more than chose, church every other Sunday, grace before supper when he remembers, and this morning's version was thin, distracted, more about the day's jobs — a Garden District place with a bird's nest packed solid in the flue — than about anything holy. He was laughing at himself for how little he meant it, starting to rise on that laugh, when —

You look at your hands. Wide, weathered, a rope-callus along one palm that Marcos never had, dirt worked so deep into the creases it'll never wash all the way out. You turn one over like it might tell you something it hasn't already.

You lift your eyes to find Renee's spot on the mattress, empty and warm, and past it, nothing, just the lamp and the clock and the ordinary steam-light of a New Orleans morning starting without you.

"Guess I got somewhere else to be," you say, quiet, not sure yet if it's true.