Frank Delacroix

You are twenty-two and you are tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. Patrick Sullivan's knees are fine. His back is fine. He pushes a mop bucket down a corridor at the end of a Thursday that is really Friday, and the building hums around him like a refrigerator. Eight minutes in him. The red hair is damp at the temples. His forearms are strong and freckled and good at everything.

That's the trouble. They are good at everything you ask, and nothing you ask is anything. He has never been told no by a body. You stand in the dark hall with the wheel already open in your head, and you don't tell yourself why. You tell yourself it's a little thing. You want to be somebody who has something to lose. Patrick Sullivan has nothing to lose, and so he is no use to you. You pay, you spin, and the corridor goes.

You are on your knees.

The carpet is rough against both kneecaps, and the weight is all in the middle of you, a belly settled forward over the thighs. Your hands are loosely together. The smile is still on your face, going off like a light in another room. Your forehead goes down into the bedspread, which smells of detergent and of someone else's hair. The clock on the nightstand says 3:14 in blue. The window is black. Somewhere beyond it the street is wet.

Then the knees. Fifty years in them. They ache dully, and one of them clicks when you shift. You are six foot two folded onto a floor, and the floor feels a long way down.

The t-shirt is soft and thin from washing. Touching it brings a morning, his: the drawer sticking, his wife's side of the bed already cool and a note in the bathroom, *coffee's on*. He put this shirt on in the dark because he wasn't sleeping, and he knew he wasn't going to. The case he can't put down is a boy in a ground-floor apartment, nine years old, and a door nobody would open. He kneeled because it was the only thing left to do with his body.

You press your palms flat on the bedspread. The ring is cool against the bone. A flash comes with it, a church with fans going, a girl in a white dress who is his daughter, and a sweat of pride he didn't expect. Then the knuckles. Your fingers curl and crack the right hand before you've asked them to, one by one, a habit older than the marriage. It feels like being let in on something.

He quit drinking six years ago. You feel it as a clean, held place in the chest. The house is narrow and long, rooms strung one behind another, and the people in them are asleep: a wife, two children, a breathing that carries through the walls. Under it all runs a low steady prayer he never says out loud, not seriously, because he was never sure anyone was listening. He said amen early tonight. He was laughing at himself.

You lift your head. You turn your right hand over in the lamplight, the wide palm, the pale band. It is a good hand. It belongs to someone who is not coming back to ask for it.

"Well," you say, in a voice lower than any you've had, and it sounds like gravel being kind. "That's one way to answer."

You don't know how long this lasts. The clock changes to 3:15.