Gordon Pelletier

You are standing in a kitchen in Anchorage before the light, in a body that is eighteen and five foot four and not yours. The gap in his front teeth keeps finding your tongue. You have worn him for less than a minute and already the bald scalp feels cold as a stone, the beard like a stranger's dog against your hand. Nothing is wrong with him. He works. He is soft in the middle, quick in the knees, and he would carry you through a whole winter of lectures. But a boy's body wants things you have already wanted, and the dark window shows you hazel eyes that mean nothing. The page is open on his phone. The wheel is a pale circle, patient, the way it always is. You press.

The engine drops a note and catches.

Heat first, wet and total, then a roar in one ear, because the other earmuff is shoved up off it. Your hands are on a bar of warm metal, vibrating. Grass is stuck to your shins. You are tall now, and light, and the sun lands on the back of your neck like a palm.

Then the things he touches start to talk.

The bar is gritty with old rubber grip, and your thumb knows the crack in it. Memory comes up through your palms: a Saturday, a younger summer, a boy riding the mower deck's shadow while he walked the rows. His son, small, laughing at the noise. The feeling is not yours. It is a quiet, tired pride, the sort that has stopped announcing itself.

The shirt is thin, soft from a thousand washes, damp along the spine. It gives you the morning in pieces. His arms go into the sleeves one after the other, left first, always. He stood at the closet a second longer than he needed to because his wife had said something through the bathroom door, and he had answered with the careful voice of a man who has learned not to win. The cuff of the gray cardigan hangs in the same closet. He did not take it down. Too hot.

The jeans are stiff with dried grass. They hold the weight of a wallet he is not carrying, and your hip remembers it anyway. Under that comes a different weight: the ex-girlfriend, recent, a name that sits in his chest like a swallowed stone. He did not do anything. He only looked at her across a table for a long evening and felt something start to open. It is the one thing nobody knows. It still aches in him, in the sternum, and you hold it very carefully, as you would hold another man's bruise.

The ring on your left hand is cool against the handle. It turns slightly when you grip. Twenty-some years of it. You feel the dull ache of the narrow shoulders, the old knee that complains when the ground slopes, the long skinny thighs. Your fingers have been busy at the edge of a thumbnail, and the skin there is raw. He does that when he is not thinking. The cuticle stings.

Sixty-three, and money in the bank he has never spent on himself. He does figures all week under fluorescent light, and out here he is happy to be stupid with a machine. Grass. Gasoline. A faint salt thread of ocean in the wet air. The silver hair is stuck to your neck.

You push the earmuff back over your ear. The roar goes soft and far. You take the next pass dead straight, beside all his crooked rows.

You lift your hands off the bar a second and look at them, long and spotted and strange, the ring bright. You turn them over. The nails are bitten ragged.

You look up at the green fence, the palms, the white sky.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is dry and mild and not yours. "Hello, Gordon."

The engine idles under you, and already you wonder how long this one will last.