Peter Joseph Hallahan

You are Gerard Kinsella, four minutes old, and already the knees complain. Sixty-four years in a body that sits down like a dropped bag. You are on the edge of a couch in a Sunset District living room, and the bald head under your palm is cool and smooth and the freckles on your wrist look like spilled tea. You wanted a retirement. You got one. The house is quiet, and the quiet has a hum in it. You cannot lift a full pot of water without the shoulder telling you what it thinks. Four minutes was enough to learn you could not do the thing you wanted, which was to run down a hill. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then the bench is under you, slatted wood against the backs of your thighs, and the concrete is cold through the soles of your shoes. Your forearms are on your knees. A water bottle sweats by your foot. The caged lamp overhead hums white. Your breath is the wrong shape for you: it was blowing through the teeth, and now it is yours.

The hoodie comes first, soft and washed to gray-black, the zipper pull tapping your sternum. Your thumb finds the cuff and it opens. A Monday morning, before light. Peter standing in the dark kitchen with one child's sock in his fist, looking for its mate, and a feeling like a held coin: let them sleep, let her sleep. He pulled the hoodie off the hook by the door because it was warm from the radiator. The jeans, stiff at the knee, give the ring. You turn it with your thumb, and a church comes up, cold stone and the smell of snuffed wicks, a man kneeling at the back, eleven years sober, saying only thank you, thank you, thank you. His wife's hand at the small of his back in the pew, light, certain. Three kids in a row like stairs. A job that is lanyards and lobbies, a smile worn all day like a tight shoe, and the savings he checks the way other men touch a wound: enough, not enough, enough. A girl from before, a laugh in a Mission apartment, and he never calls, and it is not guilt, only a window he keeps shut.

His hand goes to his own face. The beard is short, prickly under your fingers. You did not ask it to. It knows where to go.

Your body stands and wants the bar. Hands wide. Wider than he has gone all year, and you let them. The knurling bites. You grind the weight up slow, no hurry in your face, the muscles in the shoulders clean and large and obedient, and no ache anywhere. That is the astonishing part. Nothing hurts.

You look at your hands. The ring. The scrape of chalk in the creases. You lift your eyes, and you say, quietly, "Okay. Hello."

Somewhere under the ribs the wanting is already a small animal, turning over in its sleep. How long. Whether tomorrow you wake in him.