Patrick Joseph Dwyer

Tanner's thumbs are still on the phone when I decide. The kitchen is dark and the refrigerator hums. The linoleum is cold through his socks. Twenty-five years old, and his knees ache from nine hours on a fry line he never once complained about. I could. That's the trouble. I stand in his life like a coat that fits, and I can't make it matter. His truck needs a clutch. His mother calls on Sundays. Nothing in this house wants me, and I keep waiting to want it back. The wheel is a small bright thing in the dark of the screen. I press.

The streetlight comes first, orange through a gap in the curtains, laid across my cheek. The sheets are twisted and warm under my chest. My face is in a pillow. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has gone out of it, heavy as a sack. My breath had been ragged, and now it is even, one pull. I draw the arm up. I roll onto my back, and my hands fold on my chest like a man laid out. Something in the body flinches at it. It has never once slept this way.

The mattress dips under a weight I'm still learning: thick through the middle, solid in the shoulders, thirty-three years of it. The shirt twists at my ribs. I plant my fingers on it and they drum on their own, a quick pattering against the cotton, and the knowledge comes up through them.

The shirt is gray, soft from a hundred washes, and the hem is damp from sleep. Sleeve by sleeve I am in the morning he pulled it on. A closet door. A kitchen with the radio low. He tugged the collar straight in the dark window, then the black polo with the grease-stiff placket, the visor, the headset he hated for pinching his ear. He stood at the fry station while the baskets rose out of the oil dripping gold, and the heat on his forearms felt like being needed. He liked that. Under the sleeve on my upper arm the old insignia itches faintly. Behind it comes a barracks, boots in a row, a boy's laugh, and a hole where that unit used to be.

The sheet under my left hand has a hollow in it, a side of the bed that stays cold. The pillow smells like someone else's shampoo. A name comes, his, pulled up whole: Marcus. The ex, recent. A grief that sits in my chest like a swallowed stone. The nightstand has a glass of water and the evening drink, a drink or two, and under my tongue a ghost of cigarettes quit years ago, still asking. I know a doorway, white marble steps worn into dishes by two hundred years of feet, and the first sun coming down the block. He sat there with coffee and was almost happy. My jaw is smooth. I can feel that he shaved it clean last night, for no one, because it steadied him.

My scalp prickles where the hair has backed away at the temples. His belly rises and falls under my folded hands. His back aches the honest way, the way of a man who stands on tile all day and is good at it.

I lift my hands into the orange light. Broad, burn-nicked, patient. I turn them over. They are mine, and I have never held them before.

"Okay, Patrick," I say, low, in his voice. "Hi."

The street is quiet. The fingers start drumming again against my chest, his habit, and I don't know whether I'm hearing a body that will last or a clock.