James Okafor

The lamp had been sitting in a box of estate-sale junk since March, waiting for James to get around to it. He liked cleaning old things. His hands knew how to make tired metal look cared for again. That morning, propped against a stud with the diner's dead sign behind him through the open wall, he spat on his sleeve and worked at the tarnish and said, mostly to himself, the way men do on quiet jobs, *I wish things were easier.* Nothing dramatic. Just tired. Just Tuesday.

The smoke didn't ask what he meant. It never does.

You come up out of the dark the way a diver comes up for air, except the air is a body, and the body is enormous — shoulders like something load-bearing, a neck that could take a beam's weight. You feel the tool belt pulling at your hips before you understand you have hips again, a waist, a wedding band cool against a finger that isn't cold but should be. The lamp sits empty in the hand. You set it down like it might still want something from you.

Ohio comes in slow. One stoplight, cycling red-yellow-green for nobody. A diner with butcher paper taped over its windows. Sawdust drifting in the light off the work lamp like it's in no hurry to land.

You don't live here, not really, not in the sense of belonging — you live here in the sense of a name on a lease that used to mean two men splitting rent and takeout containers, one who came home smelling like cut pine, one who never came home smelling like anything at all because he'd never left. That's what you understand about him, fast, the way you understand things when you're wearing someone: roommate. Just that. Someone he trusted enough to leave his coffee mug where you'd know to move it, not someone he'd tell about the ache behind his sternum some nights, the ache that had a woman's name in it and a kid's height chalked on a doorframe somewhere across town, a house he doesn't live in anymore but still pays for.

The tattoo on his calf, you find later, in a shower that runs too hot before it runs right — script, a name, a date. You don't ask whose. You already know the ring didn't come off when the marriage did what marriages do; some men keep wearing the promise long after the person who made them make it stops answering the phone the way she used to.

A year is a long time to live in someone else's unfinished house.

You go to the job site because his body wants to, because muscle holds opinions the mind forgot to argue with. You frame a wall wrong on the second day and something in the wrist corrects you before you've finished the thought, like the hands remember more of him than you have access to. You eat what he'd eat. You sleep on his side of a bed that isn't his anymore, in an apartment with a lease that still says roommate, and some nights you catch yourself — his face, this face, your borrowed face — looking at the door like it might still open on someone who used to.

You never met the wife. You never met the kid whose height is chalked on a doorframe you'll never see. That's not your story to finish. You just carry the scar through the eyebrow, the thick hands, the ring that won't come off no matter how much soap you use, through three hundred and sixty-some mornings of a small town's single stoplight going red, yellow, green, for a man who isn't in his own head anymore, and you never once feel like you've caught up to whoever he actually was.

At the end — however it ends, whenever the smoke decides — the lamp will still be sitting on that framed-out sill, tarnished again the way brass always finds its way back to tarnish. And somewhere, a man who wished things were easier will find himself standing exactly where he started, sawdust in the air, a year gone from the inside of his own life like a room he was locked out of by his own front door.