Kenneth Lau

You are Warren Ketterman, and you are standing at a kitchen window in Ohio with a cold mug, watching frost come off a neighbor's roof. You have been him for less than a minute. Six-four, and the ceiling light sits low on you. Your knees are sound. Your shoulders go back like a door on a good hinge. Your wife's coat hangs on a hook, and it means nothing to you, because nothing in this house is yours.

You could stay. He has a good chair, good coffee, silver hair you catch in the glass, and dimples that are a pleasant surprise when you try a smile. Still, nothing in the room wants you. The quiet stays quiet. A week of this would be the same as the first minute, and so would a year. So you open the page on the phone you borrowed from his pocket, and the wheel turns the way it always does.

The sidewalk arrives all at once, cold coming up through the shoes. You are mid-pause, one foot a half-step behind the other, and the dog is at the end of a thin cord, nose in the leaves of a hedge. The early dark is blue. Someone's porch light is on across the lawn. The dog looks up past the hedge at you, ears flat, and does not like what it sees.

Then the handle. It is a plastic grip worn smooth, and it is warm from your palm, which is his palm. The cord has gone slack. Something comes up through your fingers before you ask for it: a kitchen, a long time ago, a woman's voice saying *you'll spoil him*, and the feeling under it, a quiet pride at being scolded for softness. A small brown dog, a puppy, asleep on a folded towel. The feeling is his. It is not yours. You wait for it to pass and it does not entirely.

The jacket is next. Zipped to the breastbone, soft with washing, a little pilled at the cuffs. The elastic hugs your wrists. He put it on in a dim hallway this morning with the house still asleep, one arm and then the other, and he was careful with the zipper so the sound would not carry. You feel him stand there and listen for a child's footstep, one of three, any of them, grown and gone and still somehow coming down the stairs in his head. The house in that memory is large and tidy. Money is in it the way weather is in a sky, never mentioned and never absent. He never learned to spend it loudly. He bought the dog a good bed and himself nothing.

The khakis hang loose on thin hips, and the belt is on its last hole. The sneakers are gray and broken in, and your weight rolls to the outside edge of the left heel. That goes up into the knee as a dull ache, fifty-nine years of it, patient and familiar. You are lighter than you were an hour ago. Narrower. Your breath comes shallower and quicker, and your lungs remember smoke. You feel the old reach toward his shirt pocket for a pack that has not been there in years, and a stubborn pleasure in the empty pocket.

Your thumbnail is already at the side of your finger. The cuticle is raw. You have been picking it, and he has been picking it for decades, in boardrooms, at weddings, at a hospital bed. You let it go. Then you do it again, because the hand wants to, and a flash comes with it: a long table, men in suits, the ring on his left hand turning under his thumb while a number he built was read aloud. He stood up afterward and went to wash his hands and look at himself, and he felt nothing he had been promised. Afterward he started walking in the mornings. He never told anyone why. His wife, you think, knew.

The air smells of cut grass, wet concrete, and jasmine somewhere. Your jaw is smooth. You touch it and find it freshly shaved, and the memory is there at once: a mirror, a razor, steam, and his own eyes looking back, unsurprised. A man who has made peace with a face.

The dog is still watching you. You wind the cord twice around your hand, the way he does, and your hand does it without asking. It knows how. You step off, and the dog has to learn your stride.

You stop. You hold the hand up in the blue light and turn it over: the plain band, the chewed cuticle, the thin brown fingers that are yours now. Your eyes lift to the dark street.

"Good morning," you say, and the voice is quiet and level and does not belong to you.

Now the hedge goes by, and the porch light. A long time seems to be waiting in this body, years of mornings. Or none. You do not know how long the wanting will stay asleep, and you walk on, listening for it.