Dwight Kimbrell

You are leaving Daniel Delacroix, who has been yours for less than a minute. He is standing at a dark window in New York with a mug going cold in his hand, and the stillness in his chest is not peace. It is the wanting, back already. He had a good body, a job that worked, and a pulse that did what pulses do. Nothing was wrong with him. Something he said to a mirror, a thing you will not say out loud, sent you back to the page with the wheel on it. You pay, you spin, and the mug is gone.

Now there is carpet under your socks, a thick, cheap pile, and the air is warm, lamp-warm, with a trace of detergent and old coffee. A shirt hangs open over your belly. A tie lies loose around your neck. The window is black. Somebody in this house is asleep, and a night shift is waiting for you.

Your hand is rising toward a button and you let it. It stops flat against your chest. Under the palm are ribs, and under the ribs a heart working steadily, the way a fifty-four-year-old heart does. Your belly sags soft over the belt. Your knees ache a little. Your feet are planted wide, because his feet are always planted wide.

The shirt cuff brushes your wrist, and he comes.

It is a Sunday, years back. The cotton is stiff with starch, and a woman is pressing the collar flat with her thumbs in a hallway that smells of bacon. *Hold still, Dwight.* Her laugh is his, and the warmth is too. There is a boy in the doorway in a clip-on tie, and the pride swells in your chest like bread. Then the shirt is today's, and the memory goes thin. He buttoned it in the dark so he would not wake her, and he got it wrong by one. You can feel the crooked hem tugging at your hip.

The tie slides cool against your fingers, and you are gripping it. Your thumb knows the knot before you do. A different knot, an old Windsor from the stack of ties in his head, comes with a smell of incense and wax. A church basement, an uncle's funeral, a clumsy boy being taught. *Over, under, through.* Rosary beads cold in a pocket. Seven in the morning, a pew, kneeling on a bad knee. He has never once asked for anything big.

A toothpick rides at the corner of your mouth, though your lips found no toothpick there. The habit is in the jaw, and with it comes the bus. Hot vinyl, the long hiss of the doors, a girl asleep against the window at the end of the line. He drives the same loop in the dark with the heater ticking and nobody to talk to. There is a woman from before the marriage, a name that catches and does not come, a porch light, a summer. He keeps her in a drawer and never opens it. Cash is short. The truck in the driveway is paid off, and that is the whole estate. He is not unhappy. He is tired in a way that has become his shape.

You look down. A plain gold band sits on the left hand, thinned at the edge. The thick fingers are freckled to the knuckle and steady. You turn the hand over, and the palm is creased and callused from the wheel. It is warm, it is yours, and it was never anyone's before this second.

You lift your eyes to the dark glass and say, quietly, "Okay, Dwight. Let's see."

It might be years. It might be the length of one more breath, with the next spin already waiting in you.