Gerard Lyle Kinsella

I am sitting in Leonard Fontaine's kitchen with his knees complaining under the table, and I have been him for less than a minute when I know I'm going again.

It isn't that anything is wrong with him. His body is big and slow and warm, and the chair takes him without a sound. It's his hands. I picked up his coffee cup and my thumb went looking for a handle that wasn't there. The cup has none. Some Saturday of his had put that handle in his fingers, and for one second I was grieving something that wasn't mine. I put the cup down. His goatee itches. I can't be the man who finds the house gone quiet and the dead wife's name on the mail, and then does nothing with it.

So the phone is out and the wheel is turning, ticking in my palm.

It stops.

Water. Cold glass under both hands, and a table edge against my wrists. A restaurant, amber and low. My mouth is already open on the middle of a word, an apology that I don't know the front of. A woman sits across from me. The bread basket sits between us, untouched, the napkin folded over the rolls. I look down at the glass, and I find the end of his sentence myself, and I say it loudly enough that the next table turns. My fingers give the glass a quarter turn, and it stays.

Then the weight arrives. It is lighter than Leonard, and narrower in the shoulder, with a softness at the belt. My knees are fine. My lower back has a low, patient ache, like a coin pressed there. I run a hand over my scalp, smooth and warm, and I didn't tell it to.

The shirt comes first. Corduroy-soft, gray, worn at the cuffs. The cuff against my wrist gives me a morning: his bedroom, the closet door that sticks, three shirts held up in turn. He chose this one because it was the one she wouldn't think he'd tried too hard in. He buttoned it wrong once and did it over, and his fingers were shaking, which embarrassed him alone in a room. Then the mirror. He looked at his own bald head and thought, *well, that's what there is.* He wasn't unkind about it, only tired.

The water glass is cold against my palm, and it opens a kitchen. A woman with her back to him, a pan hissing, a radio on low. A marriage, thirty-one years, and he knew the sound of her at the stove the way you know your own pulse. Then the afternoon the sound stopped being his. No shouting. A conversation at that same table, politely, two people dividing a house. He took the ring off in the car afterward, and the finger felt skinned. I rub my thumb across the ring finger now. A band of pale skin, and the skin there is tender.

The chair back presses behind me, and I get a church. Wood pew, cold kneeler, the smell of wax. He still goes. He sits near the back and doesn't take communion, and he doesn't know why he keeps going. It is the one thing nobody at his old work knew about him. He thinks God might be listening for the apology he can't finish.

The ache in my back belongs to the garage stairs. A steep driveway below a bay window, cold white light, and him hauling boxes down it at sixty-two, saying *I'm fine* to nobody. The money is quiet in him too, a steady fact, enough that he never has to think about it. What he thinks about is the evening drink, then the second one, and the long hum of the house after.

Across from me she waits. Her face is kind and a little braced. I don't know her name, and the freckles on my own cheeks I can only feel as warmth.

I lift my hands off the table and turn them over. Pale hands, spotted, the knuckles thick, a white stripe where the ring lived. They are not Leonard's. They are not mine. I flex them, and they obey.

I look up at her and say, "Sorry. I lost my place. Let me start over."

Somewhere under my ribs the wheel is already humming. How long does this one last? When does the wanting come back, and will I still be him when it does?