Gordon Maslanka

The tow truck's cab still smells like coffee gone cold in the cupholder when you feel it start again — the itch behind Gordon Maslanka's sternum that no amount of miles ever scratches out. You are fifty in his skin, muscled from twenty years of chains and winches, sitting in a gas station lot at eleven in the morning with a call sheet on the dash and nothing in you willing to answer it. It isn't the shoulder that aches in wet weather, or the ex-wife's name lighting up the phone twice this week already. It's simpler and worse than that: you know this man now. You know how his coffee tastes and how his knees pop on the ladder rack and what his laugh sounds like on the CB, and knowing a man all the way through is the thing that empties him out for you. Fifty-eight days behind this face is long, for you. You open the site on the cracked phone screen, thumb already moving before the thought finishes, and you spin.

There is no falling, no gap. There is a bed, and weight, and an arm gone dead-numb hanging off the mattress edge, and a stranger's Monday morning arriving in your chest a full nine hours ahead of the one you left. The breath under your borrowed ribs stutters once — ragged, some dream still chasing it — and then goes even, deliberate, yours. You feel the arm draw itself up like a marionette string had been cut and re-tied, feel the whole heavy trunk of him roll onto its back, hands coming to rest folded on the chest, a shape this body has never once made in sleep. Streetlight through the gap in the curtain lies across the ceiling in a thin gold blade. Somewhere below, a garbage truck grinds gears on a wet street.

The name comes first, the way it always does, off the pillow he's been drooling faintly on: Gordon. No — this one's not Gordon. This one is somebody Henderson & Co. calls by a different name every day, a name that surfaces now off the cotton pillowcase like steam off a cup — *Warren Delacroix-Simms* — no, wrong, that's not it either, and you let it settle rather than force it, because the case brings it eventually, in his own unhurried way: Denny. Dennis. Denny to nobody. Everyone calls him by his last name at the open houses, *the Kowalczyk guy*, no — you stop chasing it and let the sheets tell you instead, because sheets know a man's nights, not his name-tag.

The wedding band is the first hard truth, blunt gold under your touch, and it opens like a door left unlocked: a courthouse in April, thirty-one years gone, her in a green coat because she said she wasn't going to buy a white dress for a Tuesday. Cheryl. The name arrives whole and easy, the way real things do. Twenty-six years of Cheryl's coffee, weaker than he likes, and he has never once told her so. A daughter, grown, in Portland now, who calls on Sundays and has for around a decade made her calls shorter, and he has never said anything about that either, because saying things is not a thing this body does well. There's an ex-wife too, folded somewhere further back, sharper-edged, a marriage that ended before Cheryl's was the second one, and thinking of her brings a flash of a lawyer's office and a check written with a hand that shook only slightly.

You are on your back in an unmade bed in Brooklyn, and the body under you is heavier through the middle than the one you left, softer, less sure of its knees, sixty years old down to the marrow, and it carries a low familiar hum behind the eyes that you recognize immediately as the little white pill on the bathroom counter, taken every morning without ceremony, the thing that makes fifteen years of it bearable instead of a weight. Somewhere in the joints, a dull complaint that isn't pain exactly, just age announcing itself. Your arm — his arm — is asleep to the elbow from the hanging, and pins and needles crawl up through skin that has stood on porches and shaken a thousand hands and never once, that you can feel in it now, been struck in anger by anybody.

The name surfaces finally, cleanly, off the closet across the room where a navy blazer waits on a wire hanger, a Henderson & Co. glossy folded once in its side pocket: Gerald. No — you almost laugh at yourself for how close and how wrong that keeps coming — it's there on the lockbox key fob by the nightstand, stamped small: *R. HALLORAN.* No. You give up chasing the flash and let the last, truest thing answer it instead, the one that comes not from an object but from the whole shape of the room: he goes by Gordon at the office too, coincidentally, though everyone at Henderson & Co. calls him by the name on his card, and the card, when the memory of putting it in his blazer pocket arrives — the striped shirt going on first, sleeve by sleeve, tucked in over a stomach he stopped fighting years ago, the blazer's weight settling onto shoulders that have carried open-house folders up a hundred brownstone stoops — the card says *Frank Delvecchio.*

Frank. The morning he dressed in this — yesterday's memory, sitting right at the surface — comes back whole: standing at the mirror in this room while Cheryl slept in, working the second shirt button one-handed because the top one never sits right on a neck gone thick, checking his watch, an eight PM showing that ran to midnight because the buyers wanted to see the basement twice, and after that a two AM drive home with the radio low so as not to wake anyone, and finally bed at some indecent hour that makes eleven in the morning, right now, exactly early enough to still be asleep. That's the oddity settling into place — not a man who sleeps late out of laziness, but one who was standing on somebody else's porch with a lockbox in his fist while the rest of the street slept, and is paying for it now.

You feel all of it land at once: the wife down the hall making coffee she'll bring in soft-footed in a minute, the daughter three time zones behind her Sunday call, the ex-wife who does not think of him anymore, the little pill, the bad knees, the blazer on the hanger with the glossy folded in its pocket, thirty-one years of a green coat that wasn't white on purpose.

Your hands come up off your chest into the thin gold light, and you turn them over — his hands, wide, soft-knuckled, the band catching what light there is — like you've never once had hands before.

"Frank," you say out loud, testing the name in his voice, low and rough with sleep, to nobody, to the ceiling, to whoever might be listening on the other side of a wheel you already know you'll spin again, someday, when this stops being enough.