Gerald Wesley Mishibinijima

You are standing on a rig-house porch in Phoenix with the last of the sun on your forearms, and Jamal's phone is warm in a hand that has never once dropped anything. Thirty-four days in him. The knees don't ache. The back doesn't argue. Nothing in him is wrong, which is the trouble: there is a Sunday-evening quiet in this body and you have worn out your wanting for it. You've stopped noticing the strength. You open the page, the wheel is already turning, and you pay.

It lands. The rug is under you, thick and patterned, and your legs are folded wide beneath a belly that presses on your thighs. The lamp is a low yellow pool on your left. A book lies open on your knees, its paper swollen and stained, and your mouth is halfway through a syllable you did not choose. The third line snags. You go again, and the vowels come out round and certain, as if the mouth has done this before. You finish the page without looking down.

Then you do look down, and the touching begins.

Corduroy under your palms, ribbed, softened at the knee. It gives you a morning: Gerald stands at the bedroom closet while his wife sleeps, and he chooses these pants because they are the ones she likes. He thinks *Ruth* and the whole name feels like warm bread. The flannel next. Your shoulders feel its weight, and then the buttons under his thick fingers, one after another, the left sleeve first because his left shoulder is stiff and wants coaxing. He ties nothing, wears no badge on Sundays. The ring, a plain band, turns under your thumb, and you get the church basement: folding chairs, coffee, a pastor's hand on his shoulder, and a prayer he said for his daughter that he thought nobody heard. Underneath it, shameful and small, comes the other woman, the recent one. A parking lot, her laugh, and ending it with his jaw clenched, because he had promised God and meant it. He has told nobody. The memory sits in your chest like a swallowed stone.

The book's cover is cold and gritty. It brings you a séance in a stranger's living room, candles, a friend's wife whispering. He laughed. He pocketed this book as a joke and felt guilty for it all week. He never believed any of it.

Your nose carries a faint crooked pull when you breathe, an old break, a hockey puck at nineteen, and the memory is all noise and ice and his father shouting from the boards. Your hair is combed back tight, still damp at the nape. Your jaw is smooth from the razor. The knees ache a little from sitting cross-legged, a dull, ordinary, borrowed ache. A good heavy body, sixty-two years deep, with a pulse that is slow and sure.

You lift your hands. Thick fingers, a gold band on the left. You turn them over. They are warm and entirely his, and now entirely yours.

You look up, and your voice comes out lower than Jamal's ever was. "Well," you say. "Hello, Gerald."

The lamp hums. Somewhere in this house a floorboard ticks. You wonder how long he lasts, and when the wanting will come back to find you.