Marcus Odom

Nathan Gallagher's thumb is still on the trackpad when you decide, and the thing you will not say out loud is the sound his wife makes in her sleep down the hall. It isn't a bad sound. It's a small, trusting one, a breath with a word folded inside it, and you have been listening to it for under a minute and it is not yours. His students' essays are stacked by the laptop, red pen uncapped, and his reading glasses are on your face. You have worn all of it. It fit. Tonight the fitting was the trouble. Phoenix is dark and the air conditioner ticks, and you pay again, and the wheel turns, and you let it.

Then the knees.

Carpet under both kneecaps, a lamp's warmth on one side of your face, and the amen still in your mouth, half a laugh. You were standing up. Your weight was halfway off the floor. The smile goes out of your face while you are still inside it, and the forehead goes down into the bedspread, and the cotton smells of detergent and of him.

The first thing he gives you is the shirt. The gray tee against your shoulder blades, soft from a hundred washes, and the memory comes sleeve by sleeve. He pulls it from the dryer still warm on a Sunday evening, two hours of overtime behind him, sawdust in the creases of his knuckles that the scrub brush never got. He thinks, *I'll wash it Monday* and doesn't. He thinks of his mother's voice reading *Be still*, and of how he has never once managed it.

Your hands are together. The fingers want something. They go looking for a lighter in the pocket of the sweatpants, flick, flick, the wheel rasping, and the habit gives you a back porch in the cold, one beer past sensible, a cigarette he only smokes when he drinks. A boy named Terrell is laughing about a ladder. The smoke tastes like being twenty-three and unafraid of anything.

The nightstand clock glows. His keys lie beside it, and your eyes are drifting a little outward. You feel it, one eye lazy, the way he has always felt it, as a thing people notice before they notice him. A girl in ninth grade said it first. Another one, later, in a bar, said it was her favorite thing about him. That one he kept for a year and told no one.

The floor holds you. The knees ache the pleasant ache of a body that hauled studs all day: the shoulders loose and heavy, the forearms ropy, the lower back tight where a nail gun's hose dragged at him. Your palms know a hammer's balance without being asked. The tattoo on your upper arm pulls when you flex, black ink he got at nineteen, and for a second you taste the needle's buzz and a rented chair and his certainty.

He had a prayer half-finished. He asked for rent, and for his mother's hip, and for something he couldn't name. It sits in your mouth like a coin.

You look at your hands. Wide, scarred across the knuckles, someone else's, yours. You turn them over. You look up at the dark window, where a man kneels in lamplight.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is lower than you expected. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."