Gregory Neil Halvorsen

Rudy's knees ache on the kitchen tile of the apartment above the restaurant. Sixty-one years old, and the left one clicks when I crouch to pick up the dish towel. I have worn him for less than a minute, and already I know the weight of a tray in these skinny forearms, a weight that is not mine and not yet my habit. The tray is the reason. Seven hours of it and I cannot remember how I carried it, because he carried it for me. His hands do it without asking, balancing and turning, and I stood in the dining room like a guest at my own funeral. That is not wanting. That is being managed. A body that works without you is a body you are only visiting. So I go back to the page with the wheel, and my thumb, his thumb, the nail split along one edge, presses the button.

Dark. Cotton against my cheek, a pillow gone warm under my ear. A glow six inches from my face, and my thumb stopped in the middle of its stroke on glass.

Then it moves again. Faster than he had it, steadier, flicking past everything he stopped on. A photo of a field, a joke, a man's face I do not know. I let it go by.

The sheet under my hip is cool where he has not been lying. The pajama shirt is soft from a hundred washes, and the cuff at my wrist brings him in, unasked: a Sunday, this same shirt, a little girl climbing onto this chest with a book, her heel in his stomach, and his whole body going quiet around the happiness of it. His feeling, not mine. A church with plain white walls, a hymn he sings flat, a wife's shoulder against his arm in the pew.

The phone is warm in my palm. The case is worn smooth where his thumb rests, and it opens a different drawer: a woman from before, a girl really, laughing in a parked car with the radio on, and under it an ache he has never told anyone about, small and old and kept. He looks at her sometimes, in the dark, when the house is asleep. That is what the scrolling was. He was looking for her and not finding her.

My jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and my cheek moves when I breathe out; the dimples sit deep even though nothing is funny. My nails are bitten to the quick, and the fingertips feel strangely bare, tender against the glass. Under the blanket a ring presses the bone of my finger. Forty-two years in this chest: a little tightness behind the breastbone from the day, a stiff neck from the boardroom chair, a spreadsheet still ticking behind my eyes. Good lungs. A back that is only beginning to complain.

The dark room smells of laundry and sleep and someone else's shampoo on the next pillow. The house beyond the door is quiet, a daughter somewhere down the hall, a wife not far.

I put the phone down on the sheet. I lift my left hand into the light and turn it over. The ring, the ragged nails, the soft pale palm of a man who sits at tables.

I look up and say, quietly, "Okay. You're mine now."

Already something in his chest, in mine, asks how long.