Owen Fitzgerald

You are standing in Russell Hendricks's kitchen in El Paso, and the refrigerator is the only thing awake. The linoleum is cool through his socks. His stomach hangs over the waistband of the shorts and you have stopped noticing it, which is the problem: you have stopped noticing him. Forty-six years of knees that announce the stairs, a mole by the eye that the mirror keeps showing you, a sales rep's voice in the throat that wants to say "friend" to everyone. He worked. He was fine. For under a minute you were pleased with him.

Then you opened the cabinet to find a glass and found his wife's handwriting on a list taped inside the door, and the list was a whole life, and none of it was yours. It was not cruelty and it was not boredom exactly. It was only that you have been a thousand men, and a man is a room you stand in until the wanting comes back. It has come back. You turn the phone over. The wheel is already on the screen, the colors going.

You press.

Cold gone. Floor gone. Carpet under both knees, wool, a pattern against the shin. A mattress edge under your forearms. Your mouth is mid-laugh and the laugh is not yours, it is leaving on its own, and the word in your throat is amen, finished a breath early. You had started to rise. You come back down hard, both knees, and your forehead meets the bedspread. Linen, a little damp from your own breath. The clock on the nightstand is red at the edge of your eye.

Then the body starts to hand things over, and only through what it touches.

The t-shirt first, soft and washed thin at the collar, and with it a morning: his hands pulling it over his head in a hurry, his wife already gone down the hall, the hem caught on his beard. Not a work shirt. The work shirt is a different flash, navy, two chest pockets, the buttons done bottom to top because he always starts at the bottom. Keys on a ring against his thigh, brass, a dozen of them, the weight of every door in a building. A ladder open in a hallway, a ceiling panel pushed up, dust on his lashes, and the quiet pride of a leak found.

The ring on the left hand, pressed now against the bedspread, and the cold of the metal brings a name, Dana, and nothing tidy. It brings a kitchen, a woman laughing at something he said badly, and under it an older ache, another woman, his ex-wife, a door closed gently, a year of not knowing what to do with his hands. He still sends her a card at Christmas. His wife knows. That is the kind of man he is.

The pajama pants slide against your calves. His knee knows this carpet. His mother's rosary is in the drawer under the clock, and the shape of it arrives in his fingers though you have not touched it: a childhood pew, wax, a priest with a cold. He prays badly now, mostly to say it aloud, mostly to feel someone listening. Tonight he asked for nothing in particular. He asked for the savings not to go on the transmission. He asked to be kind in the morning.

And the right leg is bouncing. It has been bouncing against the floor the whole time, heel up, a drumming you never asked for, and the body does not stop even with you inside it. Five foot five, light, strong through the forearms, shoulders tight from reaching overhead. The beard rasps the linen. Your blue eyes, his blue eyes, are open against the cloth.

You push up from the bedspread and sit back on your heels. The room is dim and the lamp is off. Somewhere behind a wall a woman is asleep, breathing, and she believes he is coming to bed.

You lift your hand and turn it over. Callus at the base of the fingers, a nick healed white, the band loose on the knuckle. You look up.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is not yours yet. "Okay, Owen."

The leg keeps bouncing. You don't know how long he will hold, whether the wanting sleeps in him until morning or comes before the clock turns over, and you stay on your knees, listening to the house.