Frank Delaney Whitcomb

The man I am wearing has been standing at his kitchen window for eight minutes, and he cannot make his hands stay still. Gregory, that was his name. The stubble on his jaw is rough under my thumb. The house behind me is full of sleeping, a child's cough through a wall, the refrigerator humming its one note. He did dishes all day. He did them well. He did the school forms and the folded towels and the long wait at the pediatrician, and it was all fine, it was all fine, and I stood in it like a coat that did not close.

Something he could not do sent me back. He could not be still inside his own quiet. Every task finished and I was still hungry, a hunger with no name, and the wheel on my phone was already open, glowing on the counter. I pay. I spin. I let him go the way you set down a cup.

The wheel turns, and there is no travel.

The ragged breath in my chest evens out in one pull. I am face-down. The sheet is against my cheek, cool and creased, and my left arm hangs off the mattress into cold air, the blood gone thin in it. A streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across my back like a hand. My body rolls. The arm draws itself up. My hands fold on my chest. This is not how he sleeps. I know it without being told, the way you know a stranger's chair is wrong.

His memories come through what I touch.

The sheet first. Flannel, pilled at the edge, and I get her: a wife's foot finding his calf in the dark, thirty years of that, an old argument about the thermostat that turned into a joke. Warmth in my chest that is not mine. Then the band on my left hand, thin, worn flat on the underside, and my thumb turns it without being asked. Under it, a different afternoon: a girl in a borrowed car, years before the ring, rain on the windshield, a crying that he never told anyone he still remembers. A small ache. Not a betrayal. Just a room in him with the door left open.

My fingers go to my mouth. The nails are bitten down to the pink and I taste the old habit, salt and keratin. He quit cigarettes and kept the mouth. A flash: a loading dock at five, cold coming off the bay, a trailer door yawning, a box in each arm and his shoulders knowing the weight before he lifts. The back remembers thirty years of boxes. It aches in a low band above the belt, a dull honest ache, and under it the strength is real, the forearms thick, the grip patient.

His pajama shirt is soft at the cuffs. Through it the morning of some other day arrives: sleeve by sleeve, the hoodie, the orange vest zipped over it, the gloves stiff from yesterday, his own hands doing it without thought. Three children's voices in the house above the garage, and the steep driveway slick with fog. He loved them loudly. He was tired and he loved them.

The pillow smells of him, of soap and sleep. I hold it a second. He has no idea. There is nothing left of him to know.

I lift my hands into the streetlight. I turn them over. They are scarred across the knuckles, blunt, bitten, a ring on one. They are mine now, and I look up.

"Okay," I say, and his voice is low and hoarse and strange. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."