Luis Garrity

You are leaning on the kitchen counter in Gerald Pasternak's house, and the coffee is going cold in a mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST GOLFER. His knees ache when he stands too long. His reading glasses are pushed up into silver hair. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you know what's wrong: he is soft in all the places that make him content, and you are not content. Somewhere in the back of you a thing has started that was never going to stop. It's not his fault. He's fine. You open the laptop on the counter anyway, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then there is no kitchen.

There is the dark, and a weight pressing your whole front into a mattress, and your breath dragging ragged through a throat that feels sanded. Cheek on cotton. One arm hanging into cold air off the edge of the bed. A stripe of streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheet near your face like something spilled. Your breath goes even. The arm pulls itself up. You roll onto your back, and the whole heavy length of him rolls with you, six feet of it, and your hands fold at your chest, a way he has never once slept.

Now the room starts to hand you things, because you are touching it.

The T-shirt is thin from washing, and it rides up over his belly. It's navy, and it's the one he wears when he is not going anywhere. A flash: his wife's laugh from the next room, saying it's the only thing he owns that doesn't smell like dry-erase markers. The sheet under your palm is warm on one side, cold on the other. The cold side comes back as an old fear, the first year of the night shift, her side of the bed empty because she'd given up waiting for him to be a person at normal hours. No: she works days and he is the one who comes in late. He grades until the house goes quiet. He sleeps in pieces.

Your left hand is on your chest, and the ring is a plain band, worn thin on the inside. Turn it with your thumb and the afternoon floods in. A courthouse hallway, linoleum, his own sweating palms. His mother-in-law fixing his collar. The feeling is not love exactly. It is the relief of being chosen by someone who has seen the worst of the room and stayed.

The tattoos are tight against the pillow. Traditional lines, bold, the color faded to bruise. A swallow he got at nineteen with a friend's cousin in a garage, laughing, the needle's burn like a wasp. He has covered his arms in the classroom with rolled sleeves for thirty years, and the kids never mention it, and he is quietly proud of that.

Your nose is stuffy, and when you breathe through it the bridge clicks slightly to one side. A flash: a screen door, a boy's elbow, a bright white crack and blood on his school shirt at fifteen, his father saying hold still, hold still. Set crooked by a man in a clinic who didn't care. He has never minded.

The mattress sags under you, and your back remembers every year of it. A low ache above the belt. Knees stiff. The big hands underneath you could turn a wrench or hold a boy's wrist still, and they know the weight of a marker and the slap of a dry eraser. Under the bed, the floor holds a fan of papers, and something in you tightens: two kids asleep down the hall, one needing a ride at seven, one needing to be told he can do it.

There's a cigar in the drawer by the bed. You can smell it from here, a memory of smoke on the back porch, one a month, the dust going pink in the evening light, a wife saying you can't just have one, and him saying that's exactly what one is.

And an old girlfriend, once, whose name he doesn't say anymore. Her handwriting on a birthday card, in a box in the closet, and a quiet that sits in him like a stone in a shoe, not unhappy, just kept.

Light is coming gray at the curtain's edge. The house ticks. Somewhere down the hall a child turns over.

You lift your hands into the dark and look at them: broad, brown, the ring on the left, the swallow just under the cuff of the sleeve. You turn them over. They are warm and entirely real. Then you look up at the ceiling that is his.

"Well," you say, in a voice with gravel in it that isn't yours. "Hello, Luis."

And already, under your ribs, something is asking how long this one lasts.