Kenneth Mori

You are Peter Lonetree, and Peter Lonetree is tired of being asked where the birthmark is from. Twenty-three minutes in him. The store is shuttered, the keys are on the counter, the stockroom hum is in your ears, and somebody's mother in aisle six is still shouting at you in your head about a coupon. That is not why. You are in the dark of his apartment, one lamp, a cold slice of pizza, and you notice that you reach for the wheel the way a tongue goes to a tooth. He is fine. He is perfectly good. He is twenty-five and nothing in him is wrong, and nothing in him is a door. You want to be somewhere you have never been tired.

You pay. You spin. The ticks slow.

A thumb stops. Your thumb. Blue light on one cheek, the phone six inches from a face that is suddenly yours, and the dark of a bedroom pressing in at the edges. Then the thumb starts again, faster and steadier than whatever had been guiding it, flicking past everything he stopped on. You are lying on your left side. You do not blink when he would have.

The first thing is the mattress under your hip: firm, a little too firm, a bone against a board. The sheet is cool cotton, washed a thousand times, and it gives you him. A hotel in a city with a river and bridges, a younger body, a woman laughing at his bad joke over a bad dinner. Her name comes up through the fabric like warm water: Naomi. He proposed with a ring he could barely afford, and the memory is all in his stomach, a plunging gladness.

The ring is on your finger. It is turning. Your thumb and forefinger are already rolling it around the knuckle, a habit older than your arrival. When it spins, a boardroom opens: the blinds half down, stripes of late light, a bound report open on the table, his own voice steady as he explains a number he knows will cost three people their jobs. He did not sleep that night. The ring turned and turned beneath the table. It is turning now.

The pajamas are soft at the cuffs, black cotton gone gray with washing. They hold a morning rather than an evening: Naomi bought them, two Christmases ago, a size too big on purpose, because he is thin and runs cold. You feel his ribs under them, narrow, a clothes hanger of a man, and a dull ache in the lower back that he has learned to lie on his side to forgive. Sixty-one. The knees speak first. The shoulders have been tight since a tax season in the nineties.

You touch the pillow and get the other thing, the one nobody knows. Not a woman. A bottle, long ago, in a desk drawer in a different office, and the morning he poured it out in a sink and watched it go. Sober by decision. He has not told his children how close it was. The wanting for it is gone, but the shape of the wanting remains, a smooth hollow his mind slides around.

The phone is warm. Under your thumb is a stair: public concrete steps between backyards, wet leaves, the late light going copper, his daughter ahead of him taking them two at a time, and him calling to be careful, and her turning, laughing, not careful. The leaves are slick under his good shoes. He is happy. It is nothing. It is the whole thing.

Beside you the bed holds a warm hollow, and in the next room a sleeper breathes. A house full of people who would know you in a second. You do not move. You run your tongue under the gray moustache, an unfamiliar brush on the lip. You hold up your hand into the blue light.

The wedding band catches it. You turn the hand over. The palm is dry, lined, the nails clipped square, a hand that signs things. Then you lift your eyes into the dark and say, quietly, in a voice with gravel at the bottom of it, "Let's see how long you last."

The thumb is still. The light stays on your face. Somewhere a wheel is waiting, and you cannot tell yet whether the wanting is a minute away or a year.