Denny Faucheux

Warren Ostrander's apartment smells like a motel that gave up on itself, and his knee will not stop jackhammering under the kitchen table no matter how much you tell it to settle. Thirty-seven minutes. You spent nine of them finding out he takes his coffee with too much sugar and hates the taste of his own mouth in the morning, ex-smoker's mouth, and the other twenty-eight staring at the laptop with the wheel already loaded because Warren Ostrander, sixty, bald, between jobs, average in every direction, is not a man you want to keep being. Nothing happened to him. Nothing happened to you in him. That is the whole complaint. You spun for a body and got a waiting room. So you open the site again, feel the specific shame of a man reaching for his wallet through borrowed fingers, and you spin, because the wanting doesn't ask permission and it never once has been about the money in the account, five figures, scraping, whatever — it's about not sitting still in a life this beige for one more minute.

The wheel turns and there is no in-between. There is a box against your hip, cardboard biting into skin that is not skin you had ten seconds ago, and a door standing open behind you with keys still swinging faintly in the lock, and light coming low and gold through a window with old glass in it, and the smell of a house that has been other people's for a hundred and sixty years. Your body — his body — is shorter than Warren's was tall, compact, warm, used hard on purpose. You set the box down on bare floorboards because some instinct that isn't yet a memory says that's where it goes, and you leave the keys hanging because his hand already knows the door is fine like that for now. You walk the edge of the empty front room, knuckles trailing the wall, and you don't know why yet, only that the wall wants checking, corners want confirming, a house wants to be walked before it's trusted.

Then the shirt gives you the first of it — navy cotton going warm against your back, and you're standing in a different room, gray early light, pulling this same shirt over your head three hours ago in a rented room on Dauphine that still had someone else's picture hooks in the wall, and the thought that went with it: last time I do this in that room. The jeans give you more — years of them, paint and mud and concrete dust worked into the seams so deep no washing machine ever fully wins, and under that, legs that know how to stand twelve hours in a trench without complaining about it until October, when the cold gets into the knees and stays. Your name arrives with the boots — Denny — heavy leather, steel in the toe, laced the same crossed pattern every single morning for going on twenty years since a foreman on Tchoupitoulas Street showed a nineteen-year-old how it's done and how it isn't.

The beard comes with its own weather — itch in August, insulation in whatever passes for winter here, and a woman's hand once running through it laughing, early on, before it was funny to either of you anymore. Angela. The wedding band is gone but the pale strip where it lived is still there under your fingers when you touch it, and that touch opens a year all at once: the house on Dumaine you two rented and then couldn't afford together, her voice going flat instead of loud when it was really over, the specific quiet of signing papers at a table that wasn't even yours. No kids to split, at least. Small mercy, said out loud to a bartender once, the only time you let yourself say it that way.

The freckles under your eyes are just weather too, sun that never once asked if you wanted it, thirty-eight years of it laid down honest across your nose the way it lays down on anybody who works outside in this heat and doesn't much bother with a hat unless the hard hat counts. Your hands remember a shovel handle worn smooth in one particular groove, a mini excavator's stick controls, the specific give of wet spoil dirt versus dry. Your hands know how to be still working even when the rest of you can't — that leg's been bouncing since a boss called it a nervous habit at twenty-two and you never once tried to fix it, because sitting still all the way through anything has never once felt like the thing to do.

This house is new. Not new — old, older than anything you grew up in, but new to you, the first place since the divorce that's only got your name on the lease, and some tired hopeful animal part of this body has been looking forward to this specific ten seconds, box down, keys in door, house echoing empty and yours, for two weeks straight.

You look down. Freckled hands, callused, a groove of pale skin where a ring isn't anymore. You turn them over once in the low gold light coming through old glass, and you lift your eyes off them and into whatever's watching, and you say, out loud, to the empty room:

"Nobody tells you how loud a house gets when there's nothing in it yet."