Peter Maloney

You are done with the sommelier before his first glass has gone warm.

Tyler Brandt, twenty-nine, a soft belly under a good vest. Less than a minute in him, and what sent you back is the palate. He had it. You can feel it sitting in his mouth like a locked room. The woman at table six held out a glass and said, "Tell me what you taste," and you tasted wet and sour and nothing, and the word she wanted was in there somewhere, behind a door you can't open. Borrowed tongue, borrowed nose, and you stood in the Ohio noon light holding the stem like a fool. You will not say that out loud. You press the screen with his thumb, and the green of his eyes goes out of the world.

The floor is the first thing. Concrete, hard through the soles, a vibration coming up through both shins. Plastic is spooling out in front of you, a clear band running over the roller, and your left hand is lifting it and your right is guiding it. Then the motion goes wrong. Half a second. You correct it, slowly, and it comes out right. You do the next ten slowly too, checking each one. The line does not need it. The hands do.

Earplugs hang at your collarbone, yellow foam on a cord. The air smells of warm resin and machine oil. Through the tall window there is a triple-decker, white porches stacked three high, under an overcast sky the color of dishwater.

The shirt comes first. Gray-blue cotton, soft at the cuffs, a pocket gone thin. His thumbs push the buttons through at the kitchen counter in the dark, and a woman's voice says something about the bins. His wife, her back to him at the sink. He rolls the sleeves twice, left and then right. The feeling is plain and tired and fond. He does not think it is anything. He thinks: coffee.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. A glove hangs from the back pocket, the leather gone to felt. When you touch it, ten thousand mornings come at once, and under them one winter, years ago, a different woman in a different kitchen. An ex-wife. A door, a box of dishes, his own voice being reasonable. It still sits in his chest like a swallowed stone, and you let it go by.

Your right hand has found a lighter in his pocket and is flipping it, over and over, without asking you. Brass, worn smooth. Friday nights, a bar stool, a cigarette only when there is a beer. A man who is social, and a little lonely in it.

His back aches low on the left. His shoulders are strong, and his forty-eight years sit in the knees. The gold band on your left hand clicks against the lighter.

You look at your hands. Turn them over. They are his, scarred by nothing in particular, steady.

You lift your eyes to the window, to the porches and the gray.

"Well," you say, in a voice with Boston in it. "Hello, Peter."

The line keeps running. The lighter keeps turning. Somewhere behind your ribs the wanting is already asleep, and you do not know for how long.