Mark Hollenbeck

You are standing in a man's kitchen in New Orleans, and the coffee is going cold in a hand with a once-broken nose attached to it. Dustin Landry. Less than a minute of him. His thumb keeps finding the bump on the bridge of his nose, and the stubble on his jaw scratches against your knuckle. Nothing is wrong with him. He is a good body: wide through the back, easy in the knees, brown eyes that see well. You have been standing here too long, and the quiet in the house has a shape. Outside, a garbage truck is working down the block, and you could ask him for nothing more, and still the wanting has come back, thin and stupid, the way it always does. You don't say it aloud. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then the kitchen is gone and you are standing on a stepladder with both arms over your head.

The ceiling is a foot from your face. A pair of strippers is in your right hand, a loose wire in your left, and your arms are burning, a long hot line from the shoulder down. You have just done something wrong. Your hand closed too early and the insulation bit crooked. You don't know how you know that, but you do. Your hands fix it slowly, correctly. Then the next one. And the next, each one checked, all of them wanting to be checked.

The light through the front windows is thin and early. Dust hangs in it. A stoplight out on the street goes from red to green over nobody.

The shirt comes first. Its cotton is soft and worn thin at the shoulder, and it pulls across your back as you reach. A hand that is not yours rolled these sleeves twice, in a bathroom, with the fan on, while a woman in the next room ran water. A slow, easy feeling comes with it. Then he pressed the name patch flat with his thumb, MARK, and felt faintly ridiculous, the way you do at fifty-one when someone still sewed your name on you.

The strippers are warm from his grip. The handles are taped where the rubber wore through, and the tape is soft as skin. Under it, a job comes up out of the dark: a church basement, years ago, wiring the fellowship hall for free. He stood back afterward with the pastor's hand on his shoulder and thought, plainly, *this is enough.* Then another memory, harder: the smell of a cigarette in a truck cab, and the day he ground the last pack under his heel and didn't tell anyone for a month. He never touched a drink after his father. You feel that one as a floor, not as a rule.

Your knuckles itch. The right hand wants to crack them, and it does, a dry pop that goes up through the wrist. The relief is enormous. He does that when he isn't thinking. He is never thinking.

The belt rides heavy on your hips. The pouch leather is cracked and dark with oil, and under it is a house with a porch light left on, her slippers by the door, her voice saying *you're up early,* and the bank number he never says out loud, the quiet size of it. He is well off and drives a truck with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it. The boots grip the ladder's steel. Your left knee has an old complaint, your lower back a newer one, and your arms are strong, strong in a way that took thirty years of lifting.

You lower your hands and turn them over. They are broad, scarred only by use, the calluses laid down in rows. They are warm. They are steady.

You look up, past the conduit, out the open door toward the diner with its sign still lit, and you say, low, to nobody, "Well. Morning."

The hands flex. You don't know how long they'll stay yours, or when the wanting will stir again.