Glen Thibodeaux

Joel Brannigan's knees are twenty years old and I have been ashamed of them for a minute. They don't hurt. That is the trouble. I sit on the edge of a bunk in a warehouse locker room in Denver, laces undone, the light before the day, and everything in him works. He lifts without being asked. He sleeps like a dropped stone. His freckled forearms are a clean page, and I have written nothing on them that I wanted. I wanted to be bored by him, and I'm not. I want something I can't name, and I won't say it out loud, not even to the room. It's there under the smell of cardboard and his deodorant. So I open the page with the wheel on it. I pay. My thumb is his thumb, and it does not shake, and I hate that too.

Then the floor goes out from under Denver and I am crouched.

Concrete cold through the soles. Knees folded deep, thighs pressing a belly that is soft and warm and mine now. A tube hums overhead. In my right hand is one sock, damp-warm, gray, the heel thin as paper. The dryer's open mouth breathes heat on my face. Basement air, bleach and lint and old stone sweat. I haven't moved. I'm only here.

I pull the load out with my left arm, and the arm knows how. It drops the heap in the basket. The shirts come out in one scoop, and the fingers are already shaking them flat, snapping them, squaring the corners. Folding like a man ironing a flag. His hands do this without asking me.

The sock. Wool-cotton, rough at the cuff, and something opens: a different basement, a different dryer, a woman's voice from the stairs saying, you fold like your mother, Glen, and him laughing, ears hot, loving it. A girlfriend, years back. Paulette. Her hair tied up in a dish towel. He'd learned to fold from his mother in a kitchen in Gentilly, towels in thirds, always thirds, and he never lost it. It is the one tidy thing in him. Upstairs eight shirts lie crushed in a drawer, and down here his hands keep a small religion.

The gray T-shirt against my back is soft from a thousand washes. I feel the morning he pulled it on: left arm first, always, the collar catching his ear, the mirror in the hall showing him a man he'd stopped looking at. Cargo shorts, the right pocket heavy with a rosary he doesn't pray but won't remove. The headset waiting on a hook for the shift. Phones. Strangers who yell at him about bills. He says "I understand your frustration" four hundred times a week and still means it, a little, every time.

The skin of my calf prickles where the tattoo sits. I look down. A man's face in black and gray, serious, collar open. He got it after Paulette left, a face he'd admired at a bad time. Nobody knows why. Under it his shin aches faintly where the crouch pinches. His lower back is a stiff hinge. His breath comes short and sweet and tired, forty-five years of it, and the stubble on my jaw scrapes my shoulder when I turn.

He quit drinking on a Sunday after Mass. He kneels, he stands, he goes to work. There's four thousand dollars somewhere, and a lease, and nobody calling tonight.

I lift my right hand into the fluorescent hum. Thick fingers, pale hairs, a wedding-less knuckle. I turn it over. The palm is creased, lint on it. I raise my eyes to the dusty window, then past it.

"Well," I say, in his rough, easy voice, "hello, Glen."

The sock sits in my palm like a small gray animal. I don't know how long he'll stay mine. Could be the afternoon. Could be before this dryer cools. I hold my breath and feel how steady it is.