Marshall Auduboin

Three minutes is nothing. Three minutes is barely enough time to learn where the tow truck's ignition sits, whether Danny Ferraro's knee clicks going up into the cab, what his hands look like on a wheel that isn't the one that matters. You'd felt the phone in his jacket buzz once, some woman's name lighting the screen, and you'd thought: no. Not this one. Three minutes and already the itch again, the specific boredom of a body that fits fine and means nothing, muscle you didn't earn wrapped around a life you don't want to learn. Danny Ferraro had a good jaw and a bad transmission and forty-two years you weren't interested in touching. You left him mid-morning, sitting in the cab with the engine running, and went back to the wheel instead, because that's the whole shape of the thing — you spin when a body stops being enough, and no body has ever been enough for longer than a few minutes.

The wheel doesn't ask why. It only spins.

The organ stops. Two hundred people rise as one creaking body, and you rise a half-beat behind them, still learning the room. There's a coat around you, heavy black wool, a size too generous in the shoulders. There's a folded card in your right hand, damp at the corner where a thumb has been worrying it. There's a great deal of height under you, more than you're used to, the pew backs lower than they should be, a chandelier close enough to duck. Somebody's hymnal thuds shut three rows up. Nobody turns. Nobody looks at the tall man in the borrowed-looking coat at the back, because grief has its own gravity and it does not point at strangers.

The coat is the first thing that talks to you. Not his — borrowed, a memory rising fast and clean: his own black coat too warm for August in a closet that smells like cedar blocks, and grabbing this one off a hook by the door instead, his wife's hand smoothing the collar down over his shoulders, saying you'll swim in it, Marshall, and him saying it's a funeral, Colleen, nobody's grading the fit. Her laugh, quick and surprised at herself for laughing at a funeral send-off. That's new — a wife, Colleen, a kitchen with a door that sticks in humidity.

The card in his hand opens next, thicker than paper should be with what's folded into it — a name on the front you don't catch before the feeling comes instead, low and full: an old friend, a customer really, become more than that over eleven years of Thursday orders, gerbera daisies for a sister in Baton Rouge, and then no more orders, and then this. His own hands did the arrangement for the casket. He remembers cutting stems at the wet bench before dawn, water running warm over cold fingers, the specific give of a rose stem under the honed edge of pruners he's carried so long the grips have molded to his palm — and setting the spray down like it was the only thing he'd ever made that mattered.

The shoes give him back standing all day on concrete, the ache low in his spine that never fully quits, forty-eight years old and every morning a negotiation with his own back before it agrees to bend. The height comes with its own memory: ducking through doorways his whole life, Colleen teasing him about the shotgun house's low transom, why'd you buy a place built for shorter men, and him saying it was built for shorter times.

The ring is last and slowest, warm from his skin, plain gold gone thin with twenty years of turning. Colleen at the bench some mornings, dropping off coffee, dust of pollen on her sleeve when she leaves. And under that, quieter, a woman's name that isn't Colleen's — Renata — a year ago, a thing that ended before it became a thing anyone had to know about, a guilt shaped exactly like the ring, worn the same way, never once removed even then. He puts flowers on her porch some Thursdays still and calls it professional. That's his, not yours, and it comes through the gold like heat through metal.

You are standing at the back of a church that is not yours, in a coat that is not his, holding a card for a dead man neither of you will ever be able to place by name, and every stitch of it is real weight now — the ache in the lower back, the height that makes the ceiling close, the ring's small honest pressure.

You look down at the hand holding the order of service. Freckled, big-knuckled, a florist's calluses gone slightly soft at the pads from days off. Not your hand. His.

"Colleen," you say, quiet, just breath, to no one who turns around. "I'm here."

Then, because the room is still standing and the organ is done and nobody is looking at you yet — how long is anyone's guess.