Nathan Begay Whitehorse

You are standing in Connor Keegan's kitchen with a coffee going cold, and the thing that sent you back is a small one. Twenty-six papers on the table, red pen, a mug with a chip in it. He had been yours for a few weeks, and a teacher's Tuesday is a long gray hallway. Nobody warns you that a body can be perfectly good and still be a room you have already walked all the way around. His knees ache on the stairs. The freckles on his forearms are only freckles. You open the page with the wheel on it, and the thumb that does it is his.

The wheel turns, and there is no between.

A door under your left hand, a brass knob, paint flaking off the wood in white scabs. Your right hand is hanging a lockbox on it, and the motion is wrong. The shackle is half closed, the hook is missing the knob, and for half a second your fingers are doing something they have done ten thousand times without asking you. You stop. You do it again, slowly, and it seats. Then ten more small things, each one checked: the shackle, the code wheels, the tug, the paper flyers under your left arm, the weight of the blazer on your shoulders. None of them needed checking.

Air comes in thick with old beer and warm brick. A neon sign bleeds red and blue across the alley behind you, and bottles stand along the sill. The porch roof makes a strip of shade, and beyond it the morning is already hot.

Then the blazer. The wool against your neck gives you a closet and a hanger, his thumb catching the left sleeve, which always hangs crooked. The shirt is pale blue, ironed last night in a rented room with the radio on low. He did the collar twice, because the collar is the first thing a seller looks at. The belt is brown, the tongue worn soft at the fifth hole. He bought the shoes secondhand and polished them on the back step. He is proud of them, and the shine has gone dull at the toes.

In your pocket is a pen. Your thumb finds the click before you do, and it clicks and clicks. Under it comes a memory with a smell of old cigarettes. His grandmother's kitchen on the reservation, a church bulletin, the rosary on the radio. A second memory sits behind it. He quit smoking in a parking lot the winter his first commission fell through, and his hands have never decided what to do since. The pen is where they go.

His body is twenty-two. The calves are strong, the back is straight, and the stomach is empty, because he skipped breakfast to make the showing. There is a tightness behind the eyes from Saturday, his one big night this month, and a little guilt about it, and then a little more guilt about whom he went home with. Underneath it is a loneliness so familiar to him that it has stopped feeling like weather. The rent is due. This listing could cover it, if anyone ever walks up this alley and wants it.

You lift your right hand off the lockbox. The nails are clean and short. There are calluses where the pen sits, and the knuckles are brown and smooth in the neon light. You turn the hand over and look at the palm for a long moment, and then you look up.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, quietly. "Okay. Hello."

The pen clicks once in your pocket. You do not know how long this one lasts, or when the wanting comes back.