Francis Mulvaney

You are leaving Dennis Halloran because of his knees. Not the pain, which you could bear. It is the stairs at the freight dock, the way the left one locks and tells you no. Fifty-nine years of lifting other people's weight, and your first minute in him you found out how much of it he kept. The kitchen in Anchorage is dark, the refrigerator hums, and his wife's coat is on the hook. You know that only because his thumb knows the hook. The wheel is lit on the screen. You do not decide. You press.

The room arrives all at once. A lamp is on, orange and low. Cold gray light is in the window. You are sitting at the foot of a bed with your hand flat on your chest, and under the palm are ribs, and under the ribs a heart going steady and unbothered, a heart that has done this before. The shirt is buttoned wrong by one. You feel the extra collar riding up on the left. Your fingers undo it and do it right without you. A tie hangs loose around your neck, and your hands knot it into something you have never seen, quick and tidy, a thing from some other century.

Then the cloth starts talking.

The cuff against your wrist gives you a morning, his, not yours. A wedding in a parish hall, years ago, borrowed shoes, and a girl laughing at how he stood. Not the ex who matters, not yet. A Sunday, then. The same tie, loosened in the car outside Mass because his daughter wanted to ask something and he had never learned how to be asked. The feeling is a clenched, tender helplessness. He loved her so badly he went quiet.

The socks under your feet are thick, and the carpet is cold through them. You feel the route in the arches: nineteen years of stepping up into the back of a van, the same two inches of bumper, the same knock in the left ankle. Your calves are long and hard. The thighs are made of stairs. Your back is wide and a little stiff at the base, a man who lifts boxes correctly and has still paid for it. He is lean and he is fine. He is not rich the way anyone would notice, but money sits quietly in him, a calm about the month ahead, and you have not felt that in Dennis, or in the one before.

Your jaw is working. There is a toothpick in your mouth, flat and soft at the end, and your tongue turns it without asking. The taste is pine and a little mint. A memory comes up with it: his father's truck, a diner, the first toothpick, a man teaching him that you chew on what you can't say.

You rub your jaw. Stubble, three days, salt and pepper, rasping under the thumb. You rub your scalp. Smooth and warm. The window is going from gray to white, and somewhere down the block the first sun is finding the marble steps, hollow in the middle where a hundred years of feet have gone. He loves those steps. You know it the way you know a tooth.

Then you look at your hands. Broad, freckled across the backs, calloused at the base of each finger, the nails cut square. The right one flexes. You turn it over. Nothing on it you were told to be afraid of.

You lift your eyes. Whoever is in the window glass is still there, bald and freckled, and he looks back like a man who has just been introduced.

"Morning, Francis," you say, and the voice is lower than you expected, and kind.

Somewhere behind your ribs the wanting is asleep. You wonder how long it will stay that way.