Raymond Sedillo

You are standing in Owen Brandt's kitchen with your palm flat on the cold counter, and the coffee has not finished dripping. His beard itches along the jaw. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you know the thing about him you did not want to know: he is easy to be. His knees do not hurt. His back does not argue. The lab badge hangs on its hook by the door, and nothing in the kitchen asks anything of you.

That is the trouble. Nothing asks. You came back to the site with his thumb still warm from the last click, and the wheel is turning on the screen like a coin that has not decided. Somewhere a man is already in the middle of his morning, and you are going to be in it.

You press.

The floor is carpet, and it is under both knees. Your hands are together, the fingers laced loose, and a laugh is still going out of your mouth, a small one, half finished. The clock on the nightstand says what it says. The lamp is on. The window is blue with not-yet.

Then the laugh is gone, because you have taken it. You are mid-rise and you come back down, both knees, and the bedspread is against your forehead, rough weave, the smell of laundry soap and warm sleep.

The t-shirt comes first. Soft, worn thin at the collar. He bought three in a pack at a store with a wide parking lot and wore two of them out; this is the third. Your shoulders remember him pulling it over his head in the dark so as not to wake her. Her. A woman's breathing, years of it, the cadence of one particular sleeper. It arrives as comfort, not as a fact. You do not know her name yet. You know the feeling of her heel against his shin in winter.

The pajama pants have a drawstring he has knotted wrong for a decade. Your thumb finds the knot and the afternoon opens: a kitchen, two children arguing over who would carry the sack of flour, and him, younger, saying nothing, clenching his jaw so as not to laugh. Your jaw is clenched now. You loosen it. It tightens again. That is his, the way a hand is.

The carpet under your knees is thin and bears the mark of every morning. Five times a day, he doesn't manage them all. Not very seriously, lately, he would admit, only to God, who already knew. The memory is not shame. It is a long, tired, affectionate bargain, the kind a man makes with a friend who has seen him fail.

Your knees ache now, a slow ache, sixty-five years deep. The breath in your chest is shorter than Owen's. Your hands, laced, have a plain ring on the left, and the metal has worn to the shape of the finger.

You lift your head. The clock glows. Through the wall, nothing. Down the hall, a house you have never seen, turquoise on the outside, though you have no way to know that from here.

You unlace your fingers and turn your hand over. The skin is loose, freckled, honest. The ring catches the lamp.

You look up, and you say, to nobody, in a voice that is gravel and kindness: "Amen."

And under it, already, quietly, the question: how long.