Martin Joseph Keegan

You are standing in a precinct kitchenette, Anand Rao's hands around a paper cup, and you have been him for less than a minute.

That is the trouble. The body is good. The shoulders carry things without being asked, the bald scalp is cool under the fluorescent hum, and the badge sits against the belt like a small true fact. But someone down the hall says "Deputy," and you turn, and it is the wrong name for the turning. You have done this a hundred and four times. You know the shape of it: the first minute is the best minute, and this one already tastes like a coin. Something in you has gone flat and hungry. You set the cup down. You do not finish the coffee. Your thumb finds the page with the wheel on it, and the wanting does the rest.

Rain. It is all over your face before you know you have a face.

You are under a shelter, and the board overhead says 3 MIN in red. Then you are not under it. Your feet have already carried you out past the edge, one step into the runoff, hood falling back, and the water comes down cold on a forehead that goes higher than it should, the hair pulled back into two bays above the temples. You tip your head up and keep it there. Your leg, which was bouncing, stops.

Your right hand is closed around something hard and slim. An umbrella, folded, never opened. The handle is wet plastic, and it gives you a flash that is his and not yours: standing at a kitchen counter, a girl of about nine saying *you always forget it*, and the small shame of being known, and under it a warmth you did not expect.

The jacket is heavy and slick on the shoulders, and the lining sticks to your wrists. Your fingers find the zipper. Your arms remember a dark pre-dawn: this jacket off a hook by a door, the left sleeve first because the right shoulder complains, the zipper that catches halfway and has to be coaxed. He did it without a light on, so as not to wake the house. It is not a house with a wife in it anymore. You know that from how quiet the hook was.

The wool hat is damp and itches at the hairline. Under the jacket your throat is warm with a collar and a knot. He dressed for the building, not the weather: the blue shirt, the tie that is the school's colors, put on in a bathroom mirror with a hand that has been doing it for thirty years. The knot is a habit, a small prayer. Something rises with it, Mass in a cold church, a pew, a rosary he doesn't touch now but would not throw out.

The cords are soft at the thigh and tight at the belly. The weight is real. It sits low in you, a heaviness that breathes before you do. Your knees ache in the wet, a dull old complaint, and your lower back has an opinion about standing. There is a pleasant thickness in the chest, a heart that has been working a long time and is still willing.

Your jaw is rough under the rain. Two days of stubble, and you know exactly why: he stopped shaving for no one. You wait for the drinking to come up, and it comes up as an absence, a glass he doesn't pour, a number of days he does not count aloud. The relief of it is physical, a dry clean place behind the breastbone.

Brown shoes, wet through at the toe. Under the ring finger of your left hand, when you press the thumb against it, there is a smooth cool band of skin where gold used to be. The thumb goes round and round it. Memory floods in through that groove: a kitchen, her laughing at something he said, then not laughing, three kids on the stairs listening. Years of small dishes put down hard. A lawyer's office. How he drove home afterward and sat in the driveway until the engine ticked cold. He still thinks of her at odd hours, and not with anger. That is what surprises you.

The keys are in your pocket, a heavy cluster, and when you close your fist on them the whole building comes at you: linoleum, lockers banging, a child's wet sneakers squeaking, the way he stands in the hall at passing period and says every name he can. Four hundred names. He does not know he is loved by some of them.

You lower your head out of the water. The rain runs off your chin.

You lift your hands. Pale patches map across the backs of them, white islands on pink, and the same ones climb your wrists. You turn them over. The palms are plain. You open and close them, and they obey, a stranger's hands that already know the way.

The bus is somewhere behind the rain. You look up, past the shelter, and you say, low, to whoever is listening:

"Well. Hello, Martin."

Then you wait, with the cold on your face, to learn how long he lasts.