Paul Gervasi

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Colm's knees hurt. That's the thing nobody warns you about, spinning down into a twenty-year-old skinny waiter with a gap in his teeth and a whole double shift ahead of him at a restaurant on Fillmore that smells like burnt garlic — you'd think young would feel like nothing, like air, and instead it's four minutes of standing behind a host stand in San Francisco on a Sunday, mid-morning-shift-into-afternoon, feeling this stranger's ache in his lower back from a bed that isn't his, checking a reservation book with his skinny stranger's hands, and thinking: no. Not this. Four minutes was enough to know it. You didn't want a twenty-year-old's whole unlived life stretching out empty in front of it. You wanted something with weight already in it. You open the site on his phone, in the alley behind the restaurant, on a break nobody will remember him taking, and you spin because Colm Rafferty, hungry and gapped-tooth and twenty, is boring you, and there is something almost holy in how little guilt that costs.

The wheel lands and there is no seam, no falling — just water, cold, running over knuckles that were tucked around a phone half a second ago and are now wrapped tight around a sponge, soap sliding in a long low arc down a car door, and your — his — grip shifts: thumb tucking under, wrist turning in small tight circles the way it's turned ten thousand times, and behind that hand the swirl marks stop. For the first time all afternoon the door goes still and clean instead of streaked. A hose hisses against concrete somewhere near your feet. Your knees are down in a crouch, and they don't hurt at all.

The shirt is what opens first — no, not a shirt, this is a t-shirt gone soft and thin at the collar, gray, and the second your — his — shoulder rolls inside it you get this morning, early, him standing in a bedroom with blue light through half-shut blinds, pulling it over his head one-armed while the other hand's already reaching for the shorts on the chair, quick, get it done, quiet so he doesn't wake her — Denise, breathing slow on her side of the bed, one arm thrown back over the pillow he isn't in anymore. That's the flash. Then more, unbidden: her laugh from the kitchen downstairs an hour later, coffee going, the dog they don't have anymore, a fight eight years back about money that isn't a fight anymore because the shop's doing fine now, better than fine, and some other feeling underneath all of it that isn't guilt exactly, more like a held breath — an old number he still has saved under a name that isn't Denise's, a woman he hasn't called in three years and thinks about on days like this one, quiet Sundays with nothing to fill the space his mind keeps trying to fill anyway, jumping ahead of itself, always has, since he was a kid, since long before anybody put a word to it and told him it was a real thing and not just him being lazy or difficult or slow to finish what he started.

The sponge is next — foam gone gray-yellow with use, and it gives you the shop before it gives you anything else: steel counter, trays under glass, the saw's whine cut off mid-cut for lunch, the particular ache that lives permanently now in his right shoulder and forearm from twenty years of breaking down carcasses, a strength that sits low and total in his hands, not showy, just there, the way his hands know a bone before his eyes find it. He likes the shop quiet like this, hates it too. His nose — you feel it as a kind of familiar wrongness when you breathe in through it, air catching slightly crooked, from a fight so long ago the story's worn smooth as the hoop in his ear, which the water keeps sliding past, cold, and which he put in himself at nineteen in somebody's kitchen and never took back out.

His kids come through the hose, coiled green and cheap under his palm — a girl's bike left on its side in this same driveway last week, a boy's voice cracking on the phone last month, are you coming Sunday, and the answer was always yes, church in the morning if he can get himself out the door in time, which some weeks he can't, some weeks the whole day just slides sideways on him and he loses an hour to nothing and calls it ADHD now instead of calling it failure, which took him forty years and a diagnosis to learn to do. He hasn't had a drink in six years. Doesn't miss it most days. Doesn't smoke, never did, some things just never took.

The car itself — Denise's car, he remembers now, her asking him Saturday night could you get to it tomorrow if it's not raining, and him saying yeah, sure, easy, glad for a task with a clean edge and a clean end, unlike almost everything else in his head — sits under his palm dumb and patient, half-soaped, waiting.

You look down at the hand holding the sponge. It's not yours. It never was.

You say, out loud, to no one, in his voice, rough with a Boston edge that isn't Colm's California flat vowels at all: "Where was I."

The hose keeps running. Somewhere upstairs a window is open. You don't know how long this one is good for.