Raymond Kasprzak

You are still Cody Hendricks for another few seconds, standing at the kitchen counter in Nashville with the refrigerator humming and a box of crackers open beside your elbow. One minute you've had him. His beard is rough under your thumb. His nose, the once-broken one, whistles faintly when you breathe in. He is twenty-nine and his knees do not hurt, and none of that is the trouble. The trouble is that you stocked shelves in your head the whole minute, saw the cans lined up, faces out, and felt nothing pull. You want to be someone who has already been tired for a long time. You want weight. You open the page. The wheel is already turning, a slow gray blur, and you press.

Then the streetlight is a stripe across your closed lids, and your breath, which was ragged, goes even in a single pull.

You are on your stomach. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has gone out of it; it prickles. You draw it up. You roll. Your hands fold on your chest, and the body lets you, like a coat that has been worn open and doesn't mind being buttoned.

The shirt is the first thing. Navy cotton, soft from a hundred washes, collar stretched. Against your ribs it gives you a morning: his hands, not yours, pulling it over his head in this same room, thinking *clean enough*, because the laundromat is eleven dollars a week and the gray work shirts matter more. Sleeve by sleeve. Left arm first because the right shoulder catches. Then the pants, drawstring cord knotted twice, then the keys, a ring of eleven brass keys he would set on the dresser by the lamp like a man laying down a sleeping animal.

Your right thumb presses the knuckle of your forefinger, and it cracks. Then the next. Your hands do it without you, and with each pop comes the school at night: the long corridor, floor wax, a radiator knocking, the floor machine's handle humming up through both forearms. The quiet after the last bus. The smell of a hundred wet coats. A child's drawing he did not throw out, a dog in purple crayon, taped inside the closet door where nobody looks.

The sheet under your palm is cool and rumpled. You feel a name under your sleeve more than see it: *Eleanor*, 1983. Ink gone soft. A girl on a porch in Brookline, nineteen, laughing with her whole throat, and this body at twenty, so sure of it. Not the wife. The one before the wife, or the one who stood behind the wife all along, the woman who got away. He never said her name to anyone in the second marriage. You feel how it sat in him, a stone he'd stopped noticing he carried.

Your left thumb finds the bare place on the ring finger, a pale band, the skin smooth and tender. The ring's absence is a small cold circle. Two kids. A phone call he rehearses each Sunday, then doesn't make. A cigarette he wants right now, ghost-wants, in the back of the throat, twelve years quit. No drink in him either, only the tidy, scraped-clean feeling of a man who said no every day until no was a habit.

His back aches low and honest. His chest is strong; his breath is slow. Sixty-two, and the body is lean, keeps its own accounts. Under the curtain gap, wet leaves and concrete stairs somewhere below, the late hours of the city.

You lift your hands into the stripe of light. Freckles run over the knuckles, the backs, the wrists. You turn them over, palms up, and the calluses are yours now. You look into the dark where the ceiling is.

"Raymond," you say, trying the moustache around it, and his voice is low and a little rusty. "All right, then."

Nothing answers. Somewhere in you the wheel is already turning, quiet, and you don't know whether this is a night or a year.