Patrick Malinowski

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The delivery van is still ticking in the driveway, cooling, and you are standing in Donnie Zawadzki's kitchen with a paper plate of cold pierogi in his hand, and you cannot make yourself care about any of it — not the plate, not the shift tomorrow, not the ache riding up through the bad knee this body came with. Less than a minute in him and already the walls of it are visible: the bald head you didn't choose, the nose broken once by somebody else's fist in somebody else's bar, the whole blunt honest tiredness of a man who drives boxes to strangers' porches for a living. It is fine. It was always going to be fine, for about as long as a plate of pierogi is interesting. You set it down. You are not hungry in any way this body can fix. You go to the laptop on the counter, and vessel.cards is already in the address bar, the way it always is, the way it will be again after this too, and you spin.

—

The breath changes first. Ragged, then even, one long pull that isn't a decision you make so much as one that gets made through you, and the arm that was hanging off the mattress into the dark folds up and in, and the body underneath it — heavier through the middle than the one you left, softer, a stranger's exact and specific weight — rolls itself onto its back like it has done this every night of its life, though something at the edge of you already knows it hasn't. Streetlight comes through the gap in the curtain in one hard gold seam. Hands find the chest and fold there, palm over palm, the posture of a man laid out for a viewing, and you are in it, all the way in it, before you understand you have arrived anywhere at all.

—

The sheets are cheap cotton gone soft with washing, and that alone gives you something: a Sunday two years back, stripping this bed with a woman's laugh coming from the bathroom, the shower running, her voice saying *you're doing it wrong, Pat, you're doing it wrong* — Casey. Not the girlfriend. The one before. The one who is not in this bed and was never going to be, who left for Denver with a promotion and asked him, once, seriously, to come, and he said he couldn't leave his mother's grave in the ground alone in this city, which was true, and also not the reason, and he has never said the real reason out loud to anyone including himself.

Your — his — feet find the carpet without prompting, unasked, a groundskeeper's balance even half-conscious, weight settling through arches that have stood twelve hours a day on infield clay for going on nine years now. That is what the legs know: the mower's pull-drag against a shoulder that clicks every March, the particular give of grass three days overgrown, the smell of fresh-cut turf that is, on some deep unlanguaged level, the only smell that has ever made him feel like he was doing something right. The stands empty at 6 a.m., stripes laid in with a roller so straight you could put a level to them, and nobody watching, and that being fine, being better than fine — being his.

A denim shirt is hanging off the closet doorknob, the same one from the picture he never knew was taken, sleeves already gone soft at the fold from three years of the same roll, elbow to forearm, twice, no measuring, muscle doing arithmetic his mind stopped bothering with. His hand — your hand now — twitches at the memory of buttoning it this morning, thumb catching the second button crooked the way it always does, a little joke between him and nobody. Boots by the door, crusted pale with old chalk dust and something greener underneath, laces gone gray. Knees of the work pants stained through from kneeling at home plate redrawing a line that didn't need redrawing, just because the light was good and there was no reason to go inside yet.

Beside him in the bed — not touching, the gap between them a foot of cold sheet — Danielle sleeps facing the wall, one bare shoulder up over the blanket, and even in the dark, even secondhand through hands that were his and are now only borrowed, you get the whole shape of it: four years, a lease renewed twice, her name already halfway to a ring he keeps not buying, not because he doesn't love her but because some part of him is still standing on a platform in 30th Street Station watching a train not-quite-pull-out, Casey's face in the window, both of them waiting for the other one to be the one who runs. Nobody ran. The train left. He came home and mowed the outfield the next morning in dead silence and told himself it was fine, the way this whole body has told itself everything is fine for going on ten years.

He drinks the way tired men drink, not proud of it, whiskey after Danielle's asleep, three fingers some nights and more on the nights the stadium lights stayed on too long in his head after he'd already left the field. Church on Sundays when he can make it, less than his mother would've liked, more than his girlfriend expects. No cigarettes ever — tried once at nineteen behind the equipment shed, coughed till he cried, never again. A body that carries nothing on it, no marks, no history you can read off the skin, only the read of the hands: blistered once, permanently a little rough now, a laborer's hands on a man who could have been something else and instead chose grass, quiet, the particular mercy of a job where nothing needs him to be anyone.

—

You lift the right hand off your chest into the gray-gold light and turn it, knuckle to palm, watching it like it might correct itself, like it might remember it belongs to somebody currently seven hundred miles and one whole life away, gone all the way down, nothing left in there to miss it.

"Huh," you say, into a dark bedroom in Philadelphia, to a woman who doesn't wake, four minutes or four years from the next time the wheel decides that's not long enough.