Mahmoud Hargrove

You are standing in Darnell Pickett's kitchen with the left leg unbuckled and leaning against the counter, and the house is asleep. You have been him for less than a minute by the clock on the stove. The prosthetic socket sits cold on the linoleum. You came down for water and found his wife's reading glasses folded on the table, with a note in a hand you cannot read as anything but his: *Call Mama Thursday.* A feeling comes up through his fingers when you touch the paper. It is love, and it is not yours.

That is the trouble. Everything in him is pointed somewhere, and none of it is pointed at you. He has a Thursday. You have a wheel.

You put your phone on the counter. The page is still open, and the wheel is already turning.

Then you are lying on your side in the dark with a phone six inches from your face and your thumb stopped mid-scroll. The blue light is on one cheek. Your heartbeat is slow and heavy, a big soft man's heartbeat, and the breath comes down into a belly that rises against the sheet. Someone is asleep behind you. You can feel her warmth along your back, and a faint smell of cocoa butter and clean cotton.

Your thumb starts again, faster than it was. It flicks past a recipe, a bridge on fire, a stranger's dog. His last stops fall behind you.

The shirt is thin from a thousand washes, and the cotton against your ribs gives you a morning. He pulls it from the drawer in the hall, not the bedroom, so as not to wake her. Right sleeve first, always. He is on the early shift in his head even though there is no shift anymore. He stands at the mirror combing his hair over to a hard side part with water and a plastic comb, the way his father did, and pats the beard down flat with his palm. He says a short prayer under his breath, *Bismillah*, and means it. The pants, soft and dark, still smell of the cedar block in the closet.

The mattress under your hip is firm on one side and sagging on the other, her side, his side, twenty years of it. A flash comes: a hospital corridor and a tiny weight in his arms, and he is crying in a way he has told no one about. Their daughter is grown now, three time zones away. He texts her every Sunday and she answers on Monday, and he never says it hurts.

Your teeth find your thumbnail. It is already bitten to the quick, and the habit comes without being asked. Under it comes the memory of code, thirty years of it, and the silence of a standing desk at dawn with coffee gone cold beside the keyboard. He sold the company and told almost no one what it fetched. There is a cigar in a drawer downstairs, one a week on the back step, looking at the dust and the white sky. He has never had a drink in his life and has never missed one.

Your knees ache and your lower back has a dull hinge in it. Your eyes sting from the screen. All of it is yours now, along with the turquoise house and the chain-link and a girlfriend asleep against your spine who has no idea.

You set the phone face down on the sheet and lift your right hand into the dark. Freckled, thick-fingered, nails chewed ragged. You turn it over and look at the palm. Then you look up, across the room, at nothing.

"Well," you say, in his low and unhurried voice. "Hello."

Beyond the window the desert is quiet. You wonder how long you get to keep the ache in this back, and whether the wanting will come again before morning.