Frank Dombrowski

You are standing on a gantry forty feet up in Los Angeles, and the turbine is humming under your boots. Glenn Aldercy's shoulders are broad enough to fill the harness. He is six-five and has been yours for three days and five hours. His knees ache in the cold at the top of the tower, the way they did when you took him. It is a quiet ache, and you have stopped noticing it.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. At the top of the nacelle the whole county lies flat and brown, and the wind takes your breath before you have used it. Today you came down the ladder and found you were still counting rungs. There was a flat feeling in your chest, like a coin that has been spent too many times. You do not say this out loud, even in his mouth. You get out your phone with his thick thumbs and open the page with the wheel on it.

You pay. You spin. The wheel clicks around and slows, and you feel the old greed come up warm.

Then there is a cake, and you are bent over it.

The kitchen is dark. The overhead light is already off. One small flame stands up in front of your face, and your cheeks are full of air that you did not put there. You blow, the flame goes out, and the room is gone. A second breath goes in that you did not start. Your hand comes up with the candle pulled from the icing. The smoke climbs from it dead straight.

Your lower back complains first, a hinge of heat where you are folded over a table too low for you. You are six feet, not six-five, and the floor is closer than it was. The air smells of wax and sugar and radiator dust. Your hand is still holding the candle.

The henley is soft against your back and shoulders, washed so many times it has gone to felt. Its three buttons press a little at your throat, and the memory comes up through the cotton. It is this morning. Cold light, the closet door, his wife's voice from the bathroom asking whether he is wearing the gray one again. He laughs and pulls it over his bald head. The neck catches on his ears the way it always has. He does not know why it is his favorite, only that it is, and that is a whole feeling in itself. You take it in.

Your free hand goes to your face. You did not tell it to. The thumb finds the mole high on the cheek and rubs it, and with that comes a different year. A man in a cold doorway holds a cigarette he has promised to stop wanting. It is eleven years since the last one, and some nights you can still taste it. You let the thumb rest there.

The table edge is worn smooth under your palm, and a gouge near the corner catches your nail. A boy is doing homework at this table with his tongue in his teeth. A girl is crying about a math test. The man standing here, who is now you, is not saying anything. He is only putting his hand flat on her back, and the relief of her breathing slowing is a warm, enormous thing.

Something else rises under the wedding band, which is tight on a knuckle swollen with age. There was a woman before his wife, whose name sits just out of reach. There was a bridge in autumn and a letter he never answered. He thinks of her sometimes at red lights. His wife knows, and the knowing is gentle on both sides. It is the kind of thing a marriage can hold.

Under all of it there is the long dull work of the body. His forearms ache from lifting. His feet are tired inside the brown shoes. He is fifty-four and managing a floor of forklifts and shouting. The money in the accounts is a quiet fact, a cushion he never touches, a number he is almost ashamed of.

A key turns somewhere in the house, and the sound pulls at him with love and a little dread. The candle smoke thins to nothing.

You set the candle down beside the cake. You turn your hand over under the dark window, and the ring catches the last orange light off the brick.

"Happy birthday to me," you say, in a voice lower and rougher than the last one. It is a stranger's voice, and it is yours now.

You wonder how long you will have it. Tomorrow is a long way off, and so is the wanting, until it is not.