Glenn Whitaker

You are standing in a Nashville kitchen before the light, in a body that is twenty-six and enormous and hasn't done anything to deserve you. Tyler Burkhart's hands are wrapped around a coffee mug, and the scar through his eyebrow itches when you frown. A minute old, this one. You have not even learned where he keeps the spoons.

That's the trouble. You opened the cabinet and your hand knew nothing, and you stood there with the door open like a guest. All of his strength is in your shoulders and none of his life is in your head. You are tired of being handed a stranger and then being locked out of him.

So the phone is already in your fist, the wheel already turning on the little screen, vessel.cards in pale letters, and you think: one more. You don't say it out loud. Your thumb comes down.

Fluorescent hum. A drawer rail under your fingertips, cool metal, a folder half lifted. You are mid-motion, and the motion goes wrong. Your hand drops the tab, and you catch it, and do it again slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, though a job like this has not needed checking in years.

The glass door stands open beside you, and beyond it a parking lot goes blue with dusk, wet heat leaning on the threshold. Your jaw is clenched. You didn't do that. His jaw did.

The polo is damp at the spine. Cotton, navy, washed soft. Something rises from it: a hallway, a woman's voice saying *you're going to be late*, his own thumb pushing the button through the placket, the left cuff stubborn, his wife's hand smoothing the collar flat. A bun made with a tie from the bathroom counter, three tries, the mirror fogged. He was thinking about nothing at all. It was a good morning.

The folder paper is dry and cut-edged against your fingertips. A flash: a mid-level year, a regional manager who never looked up, the long patience of a man who stopped wanting the next title and started wanting his Fridays. A pen cap chewed flat. He is proud of this office and would never say so.

The ring is warm and a little tight. The knuckle gives it up a bit of memory: a church with cold pews, her white sleeve, his own voice unsteady on *I will*. His forearm carries ink in script, and when your thumb crosses the name and the date, the grief goes through you whole, not yours, enormous, ordinary, years old. You hold still until it passes.

His belly sits over the belt, soft and warm. His knees ache a little at the stairs of every day. The lanyard badge swings against your thigh, plastic edge ticking. Brown shoes, resoled twice, still forgiving. Somewhere under it all a Saturday of beer and brisket and a bad joke told well.

You lift your hands. Thick fingers, tattooed wrist, a band of gold. Yours. You turn them over, palm, knuckle, palm.

You look up, toward the glass, and the parking lot looks back, and you say, low, "Okay, Glenn. Show me."

Somewhere in the pocket against your leg something has not stopped wanting. You wonder how long before it speaks.