Karim Nassar

You are in Thomas Brennan's cab, parked in a lot off Delaware Avenue with the engine ticking down, and you have been him for less than a minute. His belly sits against the wheel. His gray beard itches under the dome light. Your thumb is already on the site, on vessel.cards, on the wheel in its small black circle. Nothing is wrong with him. He is a good body, heavy and sure, and his knees don't hurt yet. But in the glovebox there is a photograph of a girl in a school play, and you have held it, and what came up was not yours: a gym floor, a paper crown, a pride so big it was almost grief. You put it back. You do not want to be loved by somebody else's daughter. You pay. The wheel turns, and Thomas stops.

Blue light on one cheek. Cotton against your skin. A phone six inches from your face, and your thumb stopped mid-scroll on something you do not care about. The room is dark and a window stands pale beyond the bed. A wet street is somewhere under it. The thumb starts again, faster than his did.

The sweatshirt is first. Its cuffs are soft and pilled, and the wrist remembers it: this morning, no, a night two winters ago, his wife pushing it into his arms from the dryer, still hot, saying *you'll catch your death* in a language that makes it a joke. He laughs in the memory. It sits in your chest like a swallowed coin.

The sheet under your forearm, cold cotton, and the weight of the mattress with its sag on one side. Someone is not in it. Someone sleeps down the hall, or the other side has been empty a long while. A name rises, *Leila*, and then the sense of her back turned, kind and tired. Three children in three doorways of his mind: a boy who will not call him back, two girls who always do.

Your left hand holds the phone. The ring is a tight band of warmth, worn thin on the inside. Under the thumb a ragged edge on the nail, bitten to the quick. The mouth knows it. It wants to lift the thumb and gnaw. Under that, a long-quit cigarette, a craving in the back of the throat that tastes of the roof of his father's car in Beirut, windows up, smoke and cardamom.

Your knees ache with the kneeling of thirty years. A bathroom sink in a stranger's house, a pipe wrench cold in the palm, water running down the inside of the forearm to the elbow. He is proud of what the hand knows: the quarter turn, the give before the leak. He is fifty-eight, and the back says so in the dark. He is a comfortable man who does not feel comfortable.

Then the other thing, uninvited. An old photograph, a girl on a roof in summer, not Leila. His throat tightens along the mark on the neck, the wine-colored stain people look at and then politely don't. She had kissed it once, first, before anyone. You feel him not forgetting.

You turn the hand over. Thick fingers, a plain band, a bitten thumb.

You look up into the dark glass and say, in a voice lower and rougher than you expected, "Okay. Hello, Karim."

The word sits in the room. You wonder how long it holds. You listen for the wanting, the first small itch of the wheel, and for now there is only the cold sheet and the light on your hand.