Frank Costigan

You are standing in a surgeon's body, in a surgeon's hallway, and you have just understood that it is not enough.

Marcus Odom is less than a minute old to you. His shoulders are wide and his hands are clean to the wrist. Something in them is already waiting for a scalpel. You came out of the scrub sink with your forearms dripping, and a nurse said "Doctor?" to the back of your head. You did not turn. You turned the wrong way, down a corridor that was not yours. His pager went off against his hip like a small animal, and every part of him knew what it meant except you. You stood there with six feet two inches of competence wrapped around nothing, and the wheel was already open in your head.

It was not that he was bad. He was perfect, and perfect is somebody else's life. You wanted something with no one waiting on it. You wanted a man whom nothing needed.

You pay. You spin.

The engine drops a note and catches. That is the first thing: a hum in your palms, a shudder up both arms, and a handlebar of cold, gritty metal. Then the heat arrives, then the smell of cut grass, green and wet and almost sweet. Your chest is heavy and your breath comes short. One ear is bare to the air, and the other is pressed in a hard plastic cup. You reach up without being asked and drag the loose earmuff back over the ear. Your hand knows how.

Then the row ahead of you. The row behind you wanders like a drunk's. You push, and the new one runs dead straight.

The handle is rubber over steel, worn smooth where his thumbs go. It gives you a Saturday. He is nineteen and his father is walking behind him, saying "Pick a tree at the far end and walk at it. Don't look at your feet." He picks the maple. He has walked at maples ever since. The pride in it is small and private, and it is his, not yours.

The shirt is damp against your spine, soft with a hundred washings. It gives you this morning: the drawer that sticks, the green one on top because it is the one he mows in, the left sleeve first because he always starts on the left. He sat on the edge of the bed, and the bed was made, because he makes it. He put his feet into the grey sneakers. The right lace was frayed, and he thought he'd replace it, and did not. Under the thought is the quiet of a house with one person in it. He likes that quiet. It does not hurt him. It surprises you that it doesn't.

Your knees ache. It is a dull, honest ache, the kind a man carries to the end of the lawn without remarking on it. Your belly pushes against the waistband of the shorts. There is a tightness behind the breastbone, and in your shirt pocket, flat against you, a pack of cigarettes. Your fingers want one. They want it more than you do. A pack a day. You can feel the habit like a second pulse, and under it a thick taste at the back of the throat. He has been trying to quit for eleven years.

The shorts hold a key. The key gives you a glass office, the door always open, because a manager with a closed door is a manager people whisper about. Twenty-two years at the same company. He has never raised his voice. He has covered for three people and been thanked by none. There is a ledger in his head of every quiet kindness. He never collects.

Then the one nobody knows. A pew, a Sunday, the smell of wax and old wool. He kneels because his body decides to, and he says nothing in particular, only sits in the kneeling. It isn't belief exactly. It is the one hour he asks for nothing. He has never told anyone he goes on weekdays too, before work, to an empty church.

You let go of the bar with one hand. It is thick and square, with calluses where the grip sits, the knuckles pink from sun. A band of pale skin shows on the ring finger of the left hand. There is no ring, and none of the weight of one. You turn the hand over. Grass clippings stick to the wrist.

You look up at the long green row ahead, and you speak, and the voice is low and gravelly and used to being quiet.

"Nobody needs me here."

You say it like a gift, and you're not sure yet it is one. The engine idles. A storm door bangs somewhere down the street. You wonder how long the wanting takes to come back. It could be tonight, or in four minutes, in the middle of this straight row.