Neil Kowalczyk

You are standing in Leonard Bearcloud's kitchen in New Orleans, before the light, and his knees hurt on the tile. Forty-seven years of a delivery driver's knees. The coffee maker ticks. His uniform shirt hangs on the chair with the name stitched over the pocket, and you have not touched it.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. Yesterday a woman on Magazine Street signed for a box, looked straight through you, and shut the door, and you stood on her steps knowing that the face was the only thing you had ever really borrowed. Fourteen hundred and ninety-seven times. You thumb the phone. The wheel is already turning, and Leonard's thumb is steady, and you are sorry for him the way you are sorry for a coat.

Then the cabinet, the drawer, a paper box on a gray carpet, and you are standing.

A file folder is under your fingers. Your fingers are long and dry. The motion you were inside has broken: one folder dropped into the wrong slot, and then your hand lifts it out and sets it in again, slowly, correctly. Ten more follow, each one checked, as if the drawer might bite. Your shoulders are narrow, your ribs are light, there is a cool draft on a jaw scraped smooth this morning.

The folder tab is soft with handling, and it gives you him. Thirty years of these tabs. A supervisor named Dolores who taught him the alphabet drawer by drawer, and the pride of being trusted with it at twenty-two. Your hand goes up and runs over the scalp, over the hard side part, without asking you. The part has been combed there since his father combed it there.

The polo against your back is washed thin. It gives you the morning: the bedroom dark, his wife's breathing, the left sleeve first because the shoulder clicks, the cuff turned down over the tattoo he got at nineteen and has never explained to his daughters. The khakis, the belt notch worn through. The badge clipped on last, and his thumb touching it twice for luck. He quit drinking six years ago on a Tuesday. He quit cigarettes before that, and the phantom of one still sits between two fingers at ten a.m. The brown shoes pinch at the left little toe. The nose, broken in a schoolyard and set crooked, whistles faintly when he breathes in hard. Through the glass, brick houses stand under a low gray sky, and one is his street, and you do not know which.

His wedding band is warm. A name comes with it, a laugh in a hallway, and then nothing more. You let it go, because it is not yours.

You turn the hand over. The band, the black ink climbing the inner forearm, the knuckles that know this drawer. Then you look up, through the glass, at the gray.

"Well," you say, in his voice, a little hoarse. "Hello, Neil."

The folder is still in your other hand. You wonder how long until you want something else.