Peter Lindqvist

You are standing in Frank Dombrowski's kitchen with his thumb on the edge of the counter. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong with him. He is fifty-four and his knees announce the floor before his feet reach it. His scalp is cool where the razor passed this morning. The goatee itches. A beauty mark sits somewhere on his face, and you keep wanting to touch it, as if it were a mistake you could correct.

He is fine. He works. His body does what it is told, and there is a spreadsheet open on the laptop behind you that he would know how to read. But on the phone beside it is a message from a woman who calls him Frankie, and you see that the whole thing, the life you were handed, is a room with the furniture already arranged. Nothing here wants you. You wanted to be somebody who wanted something, and he turns out to be a man who has finished.

So you spin. The wheel clicks down through its names, and the light of Chicago evening goes out of the window.

Rain. It is on your face before you know you have a face, cold, steady, running into the corner of the mouth. Hood pushed back. You are standing in runoff at the curb with one foot already off the concrete, a backpack hanging from your left hand, and above you a sign reads 3 MIN in orange dots that smear in the water.

You do not move. You breathe, and the breath goes deep, because the lungs are young, twenty-eight, and nothing in them is tired. Your leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. The right knee goes up and down inside wet cloth, quick and tireless, and you let it, because it feels like being plugged into something.

The jacket is slick nylon, and its cuff is cold against your wrist. You close your fingers on the strap of the bag and something opens. It is a morning. He is in a hallway with the light off, knotting his shoes in the dark so he won't wake her, and the leather is stiff, still wet from yesterday. He whispers *sorry* to a sleeping shape. He is always sorry in the morning. The money is a stone he carries in his stomach, a number he does not say aloud, and he is kind to the stone, the way you are kind to a dog that bites.

The rain has found the collar of his polo, under the shell. Navy cotton, thin at the shoulder from a hundred washes. She bought it. No, he bought it, for the interview that made him a manager, and she ironed the placket flat and said *you look like someone who gets to decide things.* He did not decide things. He decided who covered the Saturday shift. He sat in a glass office with the door open because he thought an open door was what a good man did, and for six years people came through it with their small catastrophes, and he carried each one home with the stone.

The wedding band is cold against your thumb. You turn it, and you are at a lake, years back, in borrowed shoes, and she is laughing so hard the words won't hold. Her hand is warm in his. He thinks, *I don't deserve to be this happy,* and then, ashamed, *thank you,* to someone above the trees. He prays. It is not performance. He kneels by the bed, and the knee remembers the carpet.

Then another face, older and sharper, a girl on a porch with her hair in a clip, an old ex. He had not touched her in nine years. He keeps a single photograph of her in the back of a book, and never looks at it, and always knows where it is. That is the thing nobody knows, and it isn't even a sin. It is a window he never opens.

The bus is not here. Water runs off your chin. The chinos are soaked to the shin and the loafers squelch. The beard is wet and neat against your jaw, and you drag a palm across it. Under the lanyard in your pocket, the plastic card is sharp against your thigh, and it gives you the badge and the glass office and the faint dread of Thursday. The body is soft in the middle and long in the leg. It aches in the lower back from a desk chair that does not fit him. It is strong in the way of a man who has never been asked to be.

And he hasn't been cold in a long time. You know that, somehow. It is why he stepped out into the water. He has been warm with worry for years, and the rain is the first honest thing.

You lift your hand and look at it. The ring. The pale knuckles. You turn it over, palm up, and rain pools in it.

"Well," you say, and his voice is lighter than Frank's, a tenor with some Pittsburgh in the vowels. "Hello, then."

The sign says 3 MIN. It has said it a long time. You wonder how long you get, whether the wanting will come back by the time the bus does, or tonight, or in a year, and you keep your face turned up to the water in case it is soon.