Lionel Whitaker

You are standing at a counter in the Mission with a wrench-black thumbnail and a coffee going cold, and the man you are wearing, Arthur Petracca, has had you for one minute. One minute. His shaved scalp is cool in the draft from the open bay door. His back has already told you about the lifting. His belly is soft and his forearms are not. You have been him long enough to find that the shop phone is ringing and that someone is going to be disappointed in him by noon.

That is not why you go. You go because a customer's daughter laughed at the door, a bright and easy laugh, and Arthur's whole chest answered it. A feeling came up that was his, not yours, a longing for a kitchen you will never stand in. You wanted something that was only yours. You did not want to be carrying a stranger's wanting around like a tool you didn't know how to use. So you wipe your hands, and you find the page with the wheel on it. You pay and you spin.

Then it is a couch, and the cushion is giving under you. The room is bright and flat, afternoon through a window. There is a roar from somewhere and a crowd rising out of a television. Your mouth is dry and open. There is a can in your right hand, warm as skin, and your left leg is bouncing against the carpet on its own. You did not tell it to. The goal has already happened. You slept through it. The second replay is running, and you sit forward.

Your thumb finds the remote and turns the volume down exactly one notch. The beer should not allow that precision. Your eyes go to the ball and not the score.

The sweatpants are soft at the knee, worn thin. Touch them and you get the morning: Lionel at the closet in the dark so as not to wake Denise, the gray ones, because the good pants have not felt right since his stomach changed. He drew the drawstring twice, then loosened it. He told himself this was a man who has earned a soft day. The T-shirt is cotton gone slack at the collar, and under it there is a memory of his daughter at the stove telling him he shouldn't be drinking before dinner, and of him saying it was only one. It was never one. The can in your hand is the third. You know that through his shame, not through arithmetic. He rinses the others and hides them under the newspaper in the bin, and he has done it for years.

The ring on your left hand is plain and loose when you turn it. Touch it and it opens a church: Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a June, a young woman coming up the aisle. Then the other woman, the first wife, in a hospital parking lot, saying his name like a verdict. Two children grown and living far off. A phone call he has not returned. The money is somewhere behind it all, a brownstone he owns outright, accounts he does not look at, a fortune that never once made him sleep better.

Your body is sixty-three. The knee complains when the leg stops bouncing, so it does not stop. The scalp is thin at the crown, and the jaw is smooth because he shaved this morning, carefully, shaky-handed, so he would look like a man who was fine. There is a freckled warmth across the nose and cheeks when the window light hits it.

You look at your hands. Brown, steady, a stranger's. The ring catches the television. You turn them over and then you look up.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is deep and rough and not yours. "Let's see how long you last."

The replay ends. Nobody tells you how long this lasts, and somewhere in the back of the body a small hunger has already begun to stir.