Leonard Aubrey Fontaine

You are standing in Houston, nearly midnight, in the legs of a twenty-seven-year-old, and you are bored of his knees. They never ache. His shoulders never complain. He has a lease and a statistics exam Thursday and a roommate's cereal bowl in the sink, and four minutes of him was enough to learn that a body that works is only a body that works. When you sat down at his desk the laptop was warm, and the wheel was already there on the page, waiting like a held door. Something he could not do sent you back: he could not stay still. Under the muscle there is a hum he cannot turn off, and you have wanted quiet since you got here. You press the button. The wheel turns, and you let go of Isaiah Delacroix without saying goodbye.

Cold air. A sweet, waxy smell. Your cheeks are full, and the breath you are letting out is already leaving. The flame bends flat and dies. The light over the table is off and the kitchen goes dark, and then a second breath goes in that you did not start. Your hand, thick and slow, pulls the candle out of the icing and lifts it. The smoke climbs dead straight.

The first thing that comes is the jacket, though it is not on you. The shirt is. Flannel, soft at the cuffs, and the cuff against your wrist opens something. This morning, his thumbs working the buttons from the bottom because his wife always said he buttoned like a man defusing something. A gray undershirt first, then the flannel over it, because the house is cold under the bay window. The garage below, the steep driveway, the fog sitting white on the glass. His feeling is not yours: a small shame at the size of his stomach, and under it, a stubborn tenderness for the way the shirt still fits.

Your back is bent over the table. Something in the lower spine pulls like a wet rope. Sixty-three. The knee on the left side has an opinion. The table edge is cool chrome and Formica under your palm, and through it comes a Saturday: two children small enough to stand on these chairs, a wife laughing with her hand over her mouth because he sang flat. Every year he sang flat. Every year she said, again.

The ring on your left hand is thin and warm. You turn it with your thumb and a whole marriage drops in, not as facts but as weather. A hospital corridor, thirty-one years ago, his knees weak. Her voice on the phone saying come home, nothing's wrong, just come. A night he never told anyone, parked outside the house for an hour after the layoff, because he could not make his face say it yet. He practiced in the rearview mirror. He went in and said it badly and she held his chin, the cleft, her thumb in it, and said we'll be fine. They were.

Your fingers are at your mouth. You did not send them. The thumbnail is already between your teeth, ragged, and the habit comes with a flavor of every worry he has swallowed. You take it away.

The cake is store-bought, grocery-store rainbow, the plastic dome beside it. Someone wrote nothing on it. Someone is not coming tonight, and the kitchen knows it. The refrigerator is crowded with photographs. The wish was small, and you can feel its shape without the words, like a coin in a pocket.

You look at your hands. Broad, heavy-knuckled, the ring, the bitten nails, the candle with its black wick still smoking. You turn them over. Then you look up into the dark window, where a big man with a gray-flecked goatee looks back, and you say, quietly, "Happy birthday, Leonard." The voice is deep and rough and it fits. You wonder how long it will, whether the wanting comes back by morning, or in an hour, or at the next breath.