Gerard Mahoney

Russell Tiemeyer's hands smell like yeast and they are never clean of flour. You stand in the bakery's cold back room with the proofing racks ticking as they cool, and you have been him nine minutes, and his knees already hurt on the concrete. He is forty-four and skinny and the apron strings wrap twice around him. The ovens won't be lit for an hour. You came in early to be alone with him, and you are bored by how little there is to want. Dough, the bell on the door, the same four trucks going past on the highway. His wife's name is on the calendar by the walk-in, and you have not wanted to learn her. You wipe your palms on the apron, open the phone, and the wheel is already on the screen, patient, painted like a fairground. You pay. You spin. Russell's breath goes out of you in a long white line, and the racks tick, and the page blurs.

Then a sink is under your left hand, cold porcelain, and the razor is against your jaw.

Foam on half your face. Steam has fogged the mirror's corner. The window is white with overcast. You are tall now, taller than any body you have worn, and you are bent at the waist over a pedestal sink that was built for someone shorter, and your lower back reports this at once. Bare feet on a rug gone stiff with old washing. Your own weight is heavy and low in the middle, a belly resting against the sink's rim. The razor has stopped. You start it again, up the jaw against the grain, and it goes past the corner of the mouth without a pause, and the second half of the face comes clean faster than the first.

Then the touching begins.

The porcelain gives you the first one. This sink, the drip of the cold tap he never got fixed, his wife's voice from another room saying *leave it, Gerry, it's not going to kill us.* The shirt is the second. Soft gray cotton, washed thin, still warm from the radiator where he left it. You get the whole morning of it in his hands. He pulled the sleeves on one arm at a time, left first, because the left side of his head is where the world goes missing. The eye does not follow. He learned to turn his whole face toward people so they would not think he was looking past them. At thirty he lost it to a nail gun, a job site in Dorchester. You feel what it was to wake up and find the room had a wall in it that had not been there. The pajama pants have a drawstring he knots twice. He knotted it twice this morning, thinking about the listings. The laptop sits open on the kitchen table downstairs, and the cursor has been on the same line for three days. *Project coordinator. Applicants should be comfortable with.* Comfortable, he thinks. He thinks it bitterly, like a man being handed a word.

The ring on your left hand is loose. Your thumb finds it and turns it, a quarter turn, a quarter turn back, and that opens the long one. Marian, twenty-six years. A wedding at St. Margaret's in the rain. Two kids, now gone up and out, a daughter in Worcester and a son who calls on Sundays. The back bedroom he painted the color of an egg yolk when the first was coming. He has not been drunk in nine years, and you feel the dry shape of that in his mouth, the place where a drink used to sit. There is a tin in the medicine cabinet. Wintergreen, the lid worn pale. His tongue knows the pinch before you do. Under all of it, small and folded away, is a woman named Claire from before Marian, a summer on the Cape, a letter he never answered. He thinks of her once a year without wanting to. Nobody knows. It sits in him like a coin in a coat.

He was afraid this morning, you realize. Not of anything. Of the house being quiet while everyone else went to work.

His knees pop as you straighten. A sixty-five-year-old spine unrolls, vertebra by vertebra, and the forearms are thick and sure from forty years of lifting, and they are still his. You rinse the blade under the tap. You look into the mirror and the left eye drifts just off from where you aim it, an instant late, as if it were listening to something else.

You lift your hands from the sink and turn the right one over. Foam, a pale scar of razor-wet, the ring gone dull in the gray light. Then you look up into the glass, into one brown eye that holds and one that doesn't.

"Morning, Gerry," you say, and the voice is a low Boston rasp that you are the first to hear in it.

Downstairs a cabinet closes. Someone calls his name. You do not know yet how long you get to answer to it.