Douglas Pemberton

Father Gregory Salamone kneels in the confessional's dim booth, and the trouble is he can hear himself doing it. Less than a minute in this collar and already the knees ache in a way that isn't his pain, the cartilage of a stranger complaining under him, and somewhere behind the ribs is a heart that has taken communion ten thousand times and never once believed the wine was blood. That's the itch of it. He got a mystic — hazel eyes that have looked at God for forty-six years and found only ceiling — and the wanting was instant, ugly, almost funny: get out, get out, this one has nothing in his hands worth holding. Boredom dressed as haste. He is already reaching for the phone in the pocket of that black cassock before the old woman on the other side of the screen has finished her first Hail Mary, already thumbing to vessel.cards, already watching the wheel spin without waiting to hear her sins.

It lands on a bedroom in Brooklyn and a phone six inches from a face, and the priest's thin body drops away like a coat.

You come up inside heat — real heat, a furnace of a body running two months past a haircut it gave someone else, dad-soft through the middle, one arm dead asleep under the pillow of his own skull. The thumb is already moving. Faster than he had it moving, flicking past a recipe video, past somebody's dog, past a headline he'd stopped on for a reason you don't have yet, the phone throwing its cold blue up one cheek in a dark room that smells like fabric softener and, underneath that, the ghost of hair product from twelve hours ago. Outside, muffled through glass, a truck downshifts on wet asphalt. Sodium light bleeds around a curtain that isn't quite closed.

And then his life comes in on the seams of what you're touching.

The phone first — his hand's own shape wrapped around it, thumb pad worn smooth in the exact place it rests, and with it a flash: this same hand at the shop that morning, flat against a kid's skull to steady it while the clippers buzz a fade up the side, the kid's mother in the mirror pretending not to watch too closely. Douglas Pemberton, thirty-one years at that address behind his own eyes, and the shop comes with a smell — bay rum, hot lather, the particular ammonia sting of the sweeping brush against the baseboard at closing. His hands know things without asking him: the two-finger check on a taper, the flick that clears a comb, the exact pressure that keeps a straight razor from ever once, in nineteen years, drawing blood it wasn't supposed to. Twelve chairs' worth of men have trusted him with the backs of their necks and he has never let them down, and that is the purest thing he owns, purer than the wedding band doing its small cold work against the phone's case.

The band brings its own weather. Not stormy — worn, the way brass goes soft-edged with handling. Renata, seventeen years, the smell of her shampoo on the pillow an inch from your borrowed face right now. Two kids down the hall who are teenagers now and sleep like the dead, thank God, or they'd have heard him up at this hour scrolling instead of sleeping like he's supposed to. He works nights sometimes when the shop runs a late Sunday-into-Monday for a wedding party, which is why a grown man is lying in the dark with his thumb going at — you catch it now, the thing he'd stopped on — a profile that isn't Renata's. Older photos. A woman he hasn't spoken to since a wedding, his own, when she stood near the back and left before the toasts. Cynthia. The name arrives soft and whole, the way a bruise arrives when you press it: nothing happened, nothing will happen, he loves his wife with the plain unglamorous loyalty of a man who chose right and knows it — but some nights the thumb goes looking anyway, and some nights he hates himself a little for the two minutes it takes, and this was going to be one of those nights, the shame already gathering before you arrived to spend it for him.

The T-shirt against your back gives up the morning it was pulled on — an ordinary Monday, Renata already downstairs running the coffee grinder loud enough to wake the block, him standing in the closet's bad light choosing gray over gray because it didn't matter, because the whole day was going to be twelve heads and small talk and the migraine already needling behind the left eye, the one that's building right now, actually, a wire tightening above the socket that will be a fist by two o'clock and that he will work straight through anyway because Mondays don't reschedule. The jeans remember being stepped into on one foot, hopping, catching the dresser. Bare feet against the sheet remember nothing — they're just tired, the ordinary ache of a man on them all day, every day, for two decades.

You look down at his hand on the phone. Thick fingers, a barber's callus along the side of the index that no amount of lotion has ever fully softened, the ring catching what little light there is. You turn it over once, like checking a coin for the tails side, and the mole on the cheek prickles with an itch that isn't itching, just there, the one true landmark on a face otherwise unremarkable and entirely his.

"Okay," you say to the dark room, to nobody, in his voice, low enough not to wake the coffee grinder downstairs from becoming footsteps. "Okay."

Six hundred, and this one has hands that fix things instead of only blessing them, and a headache coming that you will have to decide, at some point today or some other day, whether to feel all the way through.