Neil Brannigan

Frank Dziedzic's knees are the reason, and I will not say so to anyone. Five-five, thirty-nine, a contractor's back. This morning I stand in his kitchen in Pittsburgh with the kettle ticking and his gray beard under my palm, and I feel the stairs in him, every flight he has climbed with a bucket. They hurt. That is not the reason either. The reason is that I stood at his window, saw the first truck of the street, and felt nothing wanting me back. So I open the page. The wheel turns. I am still holding his mug when it stops.

Then the bench is under my hands.

Half a second, and a motion goes wrong: the scraper skids, the dough smears. My fingers, which are not mine, correct it slowly, the way a man corrects after years of not needing to. Again. And again, ten times, each one checked. It is the body asking where I came from.

Cold through the soles. Concrete, floured, gritty under heavy boots, and the boots say *twelve hours*. Flour on my forearms, dry, tightening the skin. The rack of loaves ticks as it cools, a small crackling like rain starting. Dark glass ahead, a street lamp still lit beyond it.

My hand drifts up and touches my face. The cheek is smooth, shaved. Under it the chin beard is coarse. The habit is his, and with it, a flash: a bathroom, the razor angled just so, a wife's voice from the next room saying *you missed a spot*. He had not. He laughed. The warmth of it is in my chest and has nothing to do with me.

The apron strap bites at the back of my neck. Canvas, stiff with a hundred washings. A morning rises through it: his arms through the sleeves of the dark shirt, rolling the cuffs twice, always twice, the kitchen cold, a small girl asleep down the hall whose door he leaves open an inch. He ties the apron and pats the pocket for his keys. Marble steps worn hollow under his shoe on the way out, the first sun coming down the block, and his pride in the hollow, as if he had worn it himself.

I press the scraper flat. The wood grain knows him. Behind it, suddenly, a long August: a lease signed, flour in his hair, the shop that was a dream and then a profit. Money sits in him quietly, more than he ever lets on, and he still checks the oven twice. Another flash, harder: a courthouse hallway, a woman with her coat folded over her arm, the first wife, and what it cost, and the strange gentleness that stayed afterward.

The ring is cool against my thumb. A plain band. I hold the left hand up in the light.

I turn it over. Palm, knuckles, a nick of flour in each crease. Then I look up, past the rack and the glass, into the pane where a bald man looks back.

"Morning," I say, in a voice that is lower than mine. "Let's see how long you hold."