Maurice Whitlock

Dwight Kessler's knees are going, and that is partly why you are leaving him. Thirty-five, and the left one clicks every time he steps down off the dock plate. He had a body that worked, mostly. But the morning is wide and flat and Tuesday-gray out past the loading door, and you have stood in it for less than a minute with a pallet jack's handle in his hand and the thought already in him like a swallowed stone: there are so many of them, and you are only ever one. You pay. You spin. The wheel clicks down through its names and the dock goes out like a dropped plate.

Porch light. Cold air with sun in it. You are standing, and your arm is already up, fingers hovering at a monitor, and the motion is wrong, it breaks, one half-second of a hand that does not know where it is going. You do it again slowly. Correctly. The cursor lands. You do the next ten the same way, checked, each one, though the hands have not needed checking in years.

Then the hoodie. The cuffs are soft and worn thin, and it comes back through the wrist: a closet in the dark, a wife asleep, his thumb finding this zipper by feel because the bedroom light would wake her. Gray, because gray is what she bought him, and he wears what she buys. The shirt under it, navy, snug over the belly he jokes about at church potlucks. The sweatpants, drawstring knotted twice. No shoes. The porch boards are cold through his soles, and the cold brings an old summer: him on this porch, painting the rail, fifty-one, a hymn he can't place humming out of him.

Your leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. It has bounced through every standup, every deploy, every long prayer, and now it bounces under you like a second pulse.

The headphones around your neck are warm from his skin. Through them comes a night: a production outage, 3 a.m., his wife bringing coffee and standing behind him not speaking, her hand flat between his shoulders. Twenty-six years of code, and he never once told her he was afraid of being the one who broke it.

The coffee sweats cold in its cup. The ring is a small, plain pressure on the left hand. Under the sleeve, the black tribal ink on the upper arm, done at nineteen, and the shame and pride of it still there in him like a coin. His back aches low and honest. His chest is broad and soft and steady. The mountains sit blue over the rooflines and he has looked at them every working day without seeing them, and you see them.

You lift your hand and turn it over, palm, knuckles, the band. Then you look up, out past the screen, and say, low, "Maurice," trying the name like a key. Tomorrow, or four minutes from now, you will not know which, and you wonder how long this one will hold.