Gregory Fassbinder

Three minutes in this electrician's arms and you already know the whole shape of the problem. Mike Odenkirk stands in his own dark kitchen in Atlanta, the linoleum cold under bare feet, a coffee pot ticking as it heats, and his left knee — your left knee, now — aches in a way that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with a ladder fall two winters back that this body has never let go of. It is 6 AM Friday and Mike doesn't work today and there is nothing in this kitchen for you. You spun for this. You spun and got a decent, boring, unbroken-except-for-one-knee man with a decent, boring paycheck, and after three minutes standing in him doing nothing you understand that the fifth spin was already a mistake wearing a work boot. You are still holding his phone. You open the site instead of a text you were about to send nobody. The wheel is already loading before you've admitted to yourself why.

You spin.

The bed comes first — a mattress gone soft in the middle, the specific give of it under a heavy body lying on its side — and then the phone, warm, six inches off a face that stopped being Mike Odenkirk's the second the thumb kept moving. It moves on its own now, faster, past a photo somebody's cousin posted, past a headline, not stopping, because you are not reading, you are only arriving. The room is dark except for that blue rectangle laid across one cheek. Something long and hard rests against the mattress edge near your hip. A cane.

The shirt is what opens him first — not the scrubs, an old gray T-shirt gone soft at the collar, and putting it on this morning (his morning, before shift, hours that don't belong to daylight) comes back in his hands: the way he has to thread his left arm in first now, always left first, because the right shoulder catches if he leads with it, ever since the knee went and he started overloading the other side without meaning to. Gregory Fassbinder, forty-seven years old, and his body tells you the story before his mind offers a single fact. The weight of him is not unkind weight — it is a big man's weight, comfortable in a doorway, slow getting up from a chair, and the knee is the tax on all of it, a dull permanent bill that the cane by the bed pays down some nights and not others.

The cane itself, when your palm — his palm — brushes its handle reaching for the phone charger, gives you a whole hallway: the nurses' station at two in the morning, fluorescent light doing that flat thing it does to every face including his own reflected in a dark window, charts stacked at his elbow, the cane hooked over the counter edge where Denise from days always tells him he's going to trip somebody. Twelve years on nights. He took nights on purpose after Carol left, after the finalized paperwork sat on the counter for six weeks before either of them could bear to file it, because nights meant the apartment stayed empty at an hour when empty didn't feel like an accusation. Two kids, grown enough now to text instead of call, a ring finger with a pale stripe on it that his thumb finds without him asking it to, rubbing the ghost of the band the way it's rubbed it for four years.

He drinks more than the discharge paperwork would recommend for someone who hands out that same paperwork all night. He knows this. He quit smoking the year Carol got pregnant with their first and never started again, out of something that might still be love for someone, if not her. His faith is not a church thing, hasn't been since his mother's funeral, but he still finds himself talking to something on the drive home at dawn, mostly about the knee, sometimes about the kids, once in a while about nothing, just talking.

The room smells like a Brooklyn apartment in the wet part of the year, radiator-dry with damp coming in under it from the street. Sodium light leaks through the blind slats and lies across the quilt in bars. Somewhere below, a stoop, rain-shined, though you can't see it from here, only feel that the building knows the season.

His hand — this hand, thick-fingered, a working hand that has learned a hundred small mercies with an IV line and a blood pressure cuff — comes up without you steering it and touches his own jaw, the old unconscious habit surfacing before you've even claimed the rest of him.

You turn the phone face down. You look at the hand instead, turn it once in the blue-going-dark light, the tan line pale and exact where fourteen years of marriage used to sit.

"Okay," you say to the empty room, not unkindly, the way a man might greet a Friday he didn't expect to be given. "Let's see what you've got."