Raymond Joseph Tahsequah

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember, and tonight you are finally paying for it. It is the end of a dull day, after the doomscrolling, with nothing on and nothing worth waiting for. The page is plain: vessel.cards, a wheel, a button. You don't believe it. You have never believed any of the sites like it. You click anyway, and the wheel turns and slows, and the tick of it is the loudest thing in the room.

Then you are sitting up straight.

The television has cut to a white frame and you are inside the half second of it, on a couch that gives under you. The remote is in your right hand and you set it down on the arm. You have a breath and a weight, and a belly that sits against the waistband of soft sweatpants. Your heart is slow and heavy. The room is dim, but the window is bright. It is the middle of the morning, and a man is sitting in the dark with the curtains half drawn. Somewhere a house hums with summer air.

The couch arm is nubbed fabric under your palm, and it hands you something. It is a Saturday years ago. Three kids on this couch in a pile, the youngest asleep on his chest, and the feeling that nothing could be taken from him. It goes as fast as it came.

The T-shirt on your back is soft and washed thin. You remember pulling it from the drawer in the dark, quietly, because his wife was still asleep, and the drawer stuck the way it always sticks. You remember the morning's ache in the left knee as he stood. Under the ache is something steadier: he has been sober a long time, and he decided it. His hands know the decision. They want a cigarette and have wanted one every twenty minutes since before you came. They are drumming on his thigh, index, middle, ring, index, middle, ring.

The ring is warm and plain. You turn it with your thumb and get her laughing in a kitchen. Behind her, a different kitchen: the first wife, a long quiet argument, a church hallway, and his shame, which he carries without ever naming it. The carpet under your socks gives you his mother's house, the smell of fry bread and a hot iron, a rosary hung on a mirror. He prays badly and keeps at it.

On the mezzanine, where he works, the steel rail is cold under his palms. A whole floor of pallets and forklifts moves below him, and he knows where every one of them should be. That memory has pride in it, and under the pride a fear he tells nobody, that it could all be gone in one bad quarter. It is a lot of money and he is tired in a way money doesn't touch. The television goes on without you laughing where he laughed.

You lift your hands. They are broad and brown, with a wedding band on the left and fingers still tapping. You turn one over. The palm is creased and warm, and it is yours.

You look up and say, to the room, "Okay. Okay, it worked."

Your voice is lower than you expected. It is his. And underneath it the next question is already there, small and bright: how long do you get him, and when does the wanting come back?