Marcus Pennywell

You are standing in Dennis Rutkowski's kitchen in Phoenix with the refrigerator door open and cold on his belly, and the thing that sent you back is a jar of pickles. You could not get the lid off. His thumbs, his wrists, sixty-one years of them, and the lid would not turn, and you stood there under the hum of the light, heavy and bald and short, holding a jar you could not open. Twice you ran it under hot water. The clock on the stove said nearly midnight. You put the jar down, and you were already at the page with the wheel on it. The wanting had nothing to do with the pickles.

Then there is no kitchen.

There is a van's open back, a work light screwed to the wall throwing white across cardboard, and cold coming in off the dark, wet and salted. Your right hand is flat on a box. Your left is on the pump truck's handle. Your weight is already tipped forward into a shove, and the shove is wrong. It went wrong a half second ago, in someone else's arm, and your body finishes it badly. The box skews. You stop it with a palm.

You do it again, slowly, and it goes square. You check the next one. And the next.

The glove on your right hand is stiff at the knuckle, and the leather gives you something that is not yours: a hand opening this same glove in a truck cab, breath showing, thinking that his daughter's drawing is taped inside the visor. Not a picture. Only the warmth of knowing it is up there.

The hoodie sleeve drags at your wrist, and it hands you a morning: pulling it over his head in a bedroom with one lamp, the vest from a hook by the door, the vest still smelling of diesel. He zipped nothing. He never does. His knees ached on the stairs, and he was grateful for the ache because it meant the day was normal.

The jeans are stiff at the thigh. Your feet are heavy in boots with the toes gone soft. The floor of the van hums up through them, and a memory comes of the dock at four a.m. in January, a man named Gil laughing at something, steam off two paper cups.

Your thumb finds something on your left hand, a ring finger with nothing on it, a groove, and the thumb goes to it and turns an invisible ring, round and round. It does that on its own. A kitchen opens up, daylight in it, a woman setting a mug down harder than she needed to, and the long quiet after. Not hatred. Tiredness, shared. He still has not put the ring in a drawer. It is in the pocket of the vest, and you can feel its small weight against your ribs.

The body is wide through the middle and solid, forty-one years of lifting. Your lower back has a low, honest ache. Your shoulders are strong. Your cheeks feel strange; they are pulled into the dimples even now, at rest, as if the face were always about to be glad.

Beyond the van's mouth there are stacked lobster traps in a yard, a shingled house gone silver under a streetlamp, the sea somewhere breathing.

You lift your right hand off the box. The sleeve of ink runs down it, a ship, a rose, a cat, the word LOYALTY across the wrist, the color gone soft. You turn the hand over. Then you look up, into the dark, and your mouth moves around his dimples.

"Well," you say. "Hello, Marcus."

The cold comes in. Somewhere in you the wanting is asleep, and you do not know for how long.