Lionel Pettiford

You are standing at a kitchen counter in a house that isn't yours, and the coffee in Ramón's hand has gone cold. Outside the window the sky over the flat yard has not yet decided to be morning. His knees ache. He is fifty-four and between jobs, and the cracked mug says WORLD'S OKAYEST UNCLE. You have had him for less than a minute, and already you know he has nothing to teach you.

He could do nothing, that is the trouble. There was no work to be good at, and no one called. Even his freckled forearms looked idle. You stood in the stillness of a man with nowhere to be, and the wheel's old hunger came up through the floor, the one that says anyone else would be an event. So you put down the mug. You do not finish the coffee. You press the page and spin.

Then you are sitting, and the light is wrong. It is a long strip of white above you, humming. Your right knee has been bouncing, and it stops on a click from the wall, where a red 48 has replaced the 47. The paper cup is in your fingers, and the water in it is warm. You set it down square on the seat beside you. You fold your hands. A name is called across the room, and it is the name you are wearing, and you do not look up.

The jacket comes first. Its canvas collar is rough against your neck, and the cuffs are soft with wear. Under your thumb, a snap on the chest pocket gives you a morning: his wife Denise standing in the hall of the triple-decker, brushing lint off this same shoulder, saying *wear the warm one, it's raw out*. The plaid shirt beneath it carries the buttons he did wrong in the dark, one off, fixed in the car mirror. You feel his small embarrassment. You feel her humming in the next room.

His belly sits warm against the waistband, a soft weight he has stopped apologizing for. His back aches along the bench rail. His hands know how to lie quiet. The wedding band turns once under your thumb, and then a church basement opens: folding chairs, burnt coffee, his own voice saying *eleven years since a drink*, and the cigarettes he gave up after, still a phantom in two fingers. Then the lanyard in his other pocket, the drawings on a wall, a team of young engineers who say his name carefully. Then the number he has not told anyone: the house is underwater, the loan is a stone, and the paper in his jacket is from a doctor who wants to talk about the results in person. He has been praying since six. The prayer is still in his chest like a held breath.

Two children, grown, one of them calling him on Sundays. He is afraid, and the fear sits in his body as plainly as the chair.

You lift your hands from your knees and turn them over. They are broad, dry, and darker at the knuckles, and the ring catches the strip light. They are steadier than they ought to be.

You look up. The room is waiting, and your voice, low and unhurried, comes out of his throat.

"Well. Let's see what he left me."

Somewhere under the question is the other one, already asking how long, and when the wanting comes back.