Gerald Pyszko

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The concrete is cold under his palm before it's cold under yours, before there's a "yours" to speak of. One second there's nothing — the particular nothing of not existing — and then there's a sidewalk, wet with the day's earlier rain, and a hand that isn't a hand yet, just a shape you're wearing like a coat thrown on in the dark.

Gerald's hand. Broad knuckles, a half-moon of old grease worked into the creases no amount of washing ever lifted. Your brother's hand.

You sit up too fast. You feel the wrongness of it before you understand why — a fifty-two-year-old man doesn't spring up off pavement like a teenager, and the two guys from the gym standing over him know it, you can see it in their faces, that little flinch of *huh*. You make yourself slow down. Blink. Wince, a beat too late, the way a man with a real headache would.

"Gerry. Gerry, you good?" That's Sal, from the gym on Fourth. Sal who has known Gerald for eleven years and has never once seen him move like that.

"Yeah," you say, and the voice comes out low, a little gravelled, New York in it the way accents settle into brick. "Yeah, I'm good. Hit my head."

You are looking at your own hands and thinking: *these aren't mine, and they are the closest thing to mine that's existed in longer than I want to count.*

Because this is Gerald. Your brother. The mole high on his left cheek, dark as a period at the end of a sentence, the one Ma used to say made him look like he was always thinking about something. The soft belly he never lost after forty, sitting over a belt he still cinches one notch too tight out of habit. The blond hair gone thin and pale as chaff. You know this face from the inside now the way you used to know it from across a kitchen table, and it is worse, somehow, to be behind his eyes than in front of them.

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The shop is called Pyszko's, though that's a lie now, since it was Pop's name and Pop's shop and Gerald just never got around to changing the sign after he took it over. The bell over the door still has the same cracked ring. The sawdust on the floor smells the same as it did thirty years ago, and you stand behind the counter your brother has stood behind for half his life and you understand, with a lurch, how much of a man's day is made of small physical prayers — the angle he holds the knife, the way he leans his hip against the case when business is slow, the specific, unthinking rhythm of wrapping a chuck roast in paper and folding the corners like a letter.

Your hands know it. That's the strange mercy of it. The body remembers even when you don't, and so you move through the day like you belong there, and Donna at the register doesn't look at you twice, and old Mrs. Anzalone asks after your — his — knee, and you say fine, fine, it's fine, the way he must always say it.

At night you climb the brownstone stoop under the sodium light, his key finding his lock without your help, and you sit alone in the apartment that is exactly as spare as a bachelor's apartment should be after fifty-two years of nobody telling him to put his shoes away. No wife. No kids. No photograph on the wall except one, small, of two boys on a stoop much like this one, arms slung over each other's necks, squinting into a sun neither of them remembers anymore.

You look at that photograph a long time.

You think about how strange it is, to be given your brother like this — not to talk to, not to sit across from at a table, but to *be*, from the inside, alone, with nobody to tell. You want, badly, to call yourself. To dial a number that isn't yours to dial anymore. There's no version of this where you get to say *it's me* to anyone who'd understand what that meant.

So instead you do what he would do. You go to the shop in the mornings and you sharpen the knives when the trays run low and the saw goes quiet, and you let Sal talk about the Mets, and you let Mrs. Anzalone call you a good boy though you are fifty-two years old wearing a fifty-two-year-old face. You touch the mole on the cheek sometimes, in the mirror, the one thing anybody would notice about him, and you think: *this is the last true thing left of you, and I'm the one holding it now.*

You do not know how long you have him. You only know that every evening the door under the sodium light opens easier, like the lock is starting to recognize your hand as his — as if the two of you, brother and borrower, are slowly becoming one weather-worn, soft-middled, ordinary man walking home from work, alone, but no longer only himself.