Gerald Pruitt

Warren Astle has been sitting on the edge of somebody's borrowed bed in Nashville for three minutes, looking at the prosthetic leg propped against the nightstand like it belongs to a stranger, because it does. Three minutes is not enough. It is never enough. The leg still feels like a fact reported to you rather than a thing you own, the phantom itch above where the knee used to be already going stale, and the room smells like a retired man's aftershave and a life that ended at some ordinary hour on some ordinary day, and you are bored of it already — bored the specific way you get bored of a body that is fine, that works, that gives you nothing to push against. Warren was sixty-three and had already done his interesting things before you got here. There is a flatness to inheriting a man's afternoon when the man had stopped wanting anything. So you get up on the leg you have not learned yet, find the laptop, find vessel.cards still open in a tab from before, and you do not think about it as a decision so much as a hand reaching for a second drink.

You spin.

The couch takes your weight before you understand it is a couch, before you understand anything — a wide dad-bod heaviness dropping through you all at once, feet bare on carpet, a can gone warm and light in your right hand because the beer in it is almost gone, and the television is loud, too loud, showing you a soccer ball crossing a green field and a stadium roaring at a goal you slept through. Your mouth is open. You did not choose that; it was already open when you arrived, dry at the corners, and you close it, and your thumb finds the volume button on the remote with a certainty that startles you, because you have not decided to do that either.

Then the shirt gets you. Gray, soft, worn through a hundred washes, and it comes back in his own body's memory rather than yours: him standing in front of a closet this morning — no, not this morning, some morning, they blur — pulling this exact shirt over his head because his wife had already picked out the checked one and the cardigan for the thing at the kids' school, and he'd worn that instead, all day, under fluorescent light, at a desk with two monitors, reconciling numbers that did not reconcile, a client's numbers, a spreadsheet with a hole in it that keeps getting bigger every quarter he touches it, a hole that is also, unmistakably, his own hole, the one under the house, the one he does not tell Marisol the real size of. Deep. He knows exactly how deep. He does the math for other people all day and lies to himself about his own at night, and this shirt has been on him through four years of that lie, through birthdays, through the second daughter's braces, through the third kid, the one that came late and surprised them both, through the morning he sat in his car in the driveway that cuts down steep under the bay window and didn't go in for eleven minutes because Ana's name lit up his phone one more time and he didn't answer it, didn't call her back, hasn't in three weeks, and still feels her like a held breath in his chest whenever the phone buzzes and it isn't her.

The can in your hand gives you nothing — just aluminum, temperature, an old habit of holding something rather than drinking, because he never drinks, hasn't since before the third kid, out of a promise made in a hospital hallway to a God he still goes to on Sundays out of something more honest than obligation. The couch under your legs gives you the weight of every night like this one: game on, one of the kids' books stacked at his hip because somebody left them there, feet bare because his ankles swell now, the diabetes making itself known in small quiet insults he has stopped mentioning to anyone. His body is fifty-five and carries itself like a man who used to be an athlete and forgot to stop eating like one. His hands, when you feel them settle on his own knees, know things — the exact pressure of a stapler, the specific two-finger drag across a keyboard when a number is wrong, the particular way he rubs his temple with a thumb when Marisol asks him, again, if they're okay, and he says yes, again, meaning the marriage and not the money, because one of those is true.

You look down at those hands now. Fifty-five years old, a plain band on the left one, a little swollen at the knuckle the way his father's were. Not your hands. Not Warren's either, not anymore — Warren is already three minutes and one lifetime ago, folded up somewhere you don't look back at.

You lift your eyes to the dark television glass, where a bald, heavy, sleep-soft face is looking back at you not quite the way he used to.

"Hell of a goal," you say, out loud, to no one, in his voice, and reach for the can like it still means something to hold.