Frank Meighan

You are twenty-seven and the sun in Houston is already heavy on the back of a neck that is not yours anymore. It is mid-morning, and you are standing in a sailor's pressed life with a duty roster in the pocket. The body is fine. It runs the stairs in the barracks and never complains. But a thing happened in it an hour ago, in the parking lot, with a woman's voice on the phone. A voice from his old life said a name you could not answer to, and you stood there with all that strength and nothing to say. You are done with him. You open the page with the wheel on it and press.

Then there is a hose running, and the sponge is wet in your right hand.

Sun on a driveway. A door panel in front of you, gray and streaming, soap sliding down it in wide arcs. Your thumb is tucked, your wrist is turning small circles, and you stop. Behind you, you somehow know, there are no swirl marks on the paint. For the first time all afternoon.

The sponge is rough on one side and soft on the other, and the cold of it comes up your forearm. Something opens. The hands know this. He learned the small circles from a man at a car lot in Queens, thirty-some years ago, a man who said swirls come from pushing, never from the sponge. The hands have been trying to be that careful since. Your back hurts low on the left, the long ache of a man who has sat in a cab for thirty years. Your knees are old. Your lungs feel narrow and tarry, hungry for the pack in his shirt pocket. Your jaw is rough with gray stubble. When you smile, you feel the dimples cut in, even though nothing is funny.

The T-shirt is damp and soft against your ribs. The morning comes with it: he stood in the bedroom while the wife slept, pulled the shirt off the chair, and thought, this one's for washing the car, the good ones stay folded. He pulled the cargo shorts up over a belt-hole worn too far, because he is skinny and always has been. The ring, a plain band, turned on his finger as he tied his shoes. He thought of the kids, grown and gone, two of them, and how the house is quiet in a way that does not feel like peace.

The hose water runs over your sneaker, and cold floods in. Under it, a gravel yard in the dark and a diesel engine ticking as it cooled. Dawn at a truck stop. Coffee in a paper cup, a cigarette, the rig's flank beaded with dew. He loved that hour. Nobody wanted anything from him then. Under the sleeve, black tribal ink pulls when you flex your arm. He got it at twenty-two, drunk, in Jersey, and has not touched a drink in nine years. His wife never minded it. The ex, Donna, once traced it with a finger on a porch swing, and the memory arrives so gently it makes your chest ache with a grief that is entirely his.

You lift the sponge. The suds run down your wrist.

You look at your hand, the knuckles knotted and the ring catching sun. You turn it over. It is the hand of a man who held steering wheels and little children and a wife in a hospital hallway once. Then you look up and say, to no one, to the car, to the street:

"Well. Hello, Frank."

The hose keeps running. His heart goes steady in your chest, and you wonder how long it will last, and whether you will still be here when the water is shut off.