Peter Lamoureux

You are standing in Ernie Salcido's kitchen, in the dark, with his reading glasses pushed up into his silver hair. The refrigerator hums. His knees ache from the tile. Somewhere down the hall a fan turns over a sleeping woman who is not yours, and you have been standing here less than a minute with a glass of water you haven't drunk.

You wanted him to be enough. He is fifty and heavy and kind, and his hands know how to cap a marker and clap an eraser clean. But the glass in your hand tastes like nothing, and the wanting is there under the sink-light, the old itch, a page with a wheel on it. You know what it is. It is the same thing every time, and you don't say it out loud, not even here with nobody awake to hear.

The phone is on the counter. You pay. You spin.

Cold. Cold first, a clean blade of it down the throat, and breath that shows white. You are mid-stride, one foot in the air, and the stumble you inherit never lands: your weight comes down on the other foot and the running just goes on. Gravel under the shoes. Water to your left, black and still. Something in the ear is playing a drumbeat that means nothing to you. On the wrist a watch buzzes, a split it has no record of him ever holding.

Your arms drop lower. Your head stays still. Your lungs are working at the edge of what they will give, a hot wet scrape, and the belly bounces against the fleece with every footfall, and you like it, God help you, you like the honest weight of it.

The fleece comes first. Zipper cold against the chin, and then the morning is in you, his and not yours: the dark bedroom, his wife asleep with her back to him, the quiet way he slid the drawer. The fleece was a Christmas gift. He wore it standing in the dooryard with the lobster traps stacked silver against the gray shingle, and he thought, *just to the canal and back, just four miles, then the glass office and the open door.* He is a man who keeps his door open because he was once afraid of a boss who kept his shut.

The ring turns on your finger as you pump your arm. A plain band. A flash: a church basement, folding chairs, a woman laughing with a paper cup in her hand, and his whole chest lifting like a gull. Then a girl, small, asleep on his shoulder in a truck, drool warm on the fleece's collar. Your throat goes tight on a love you did not earn and cannot give back.

The sleeve under the fleece is tight on the right arm, and the ink there remembers the needle: fine lines, hours of them, a city he went to once alone. He did it the year he quit drinking. He sat in the chair and counted the lines as they came, a man building a fence one wire at a time. Faith is in there too, a plain hard thing he holds at four a.m., in the kitchen, in the dark, hands flat on the table, before the vape and the shoes.

The vape is in the pocket. Your thumb finds it without asking. Your knees burn, your calves are tight and full, and the mullet drags along your neck, dyed too black, and you feel his small shy vanity in it, the one rebellion he allowed himself.

The path bends. The lamp ahead glows over the water. Your heart is a fist knocking, and every step is his.

You lift your right hand from the rhythm and look at it: freckled across the knuckles, the sleeve's fine lines running down over the wrist. You turn it over. The palm is rough in odd places, from oars, from a daughter's bike seat.

You look up, breath smoking, and you say, "Okay, Peter. Okay." Your voice comes out lower than the last one, and strange.

The watch buzzes again. You don't know how long this one lasts. You only know your legs keep going, and the wanting sits quiet in you, for now.