Ronald Petrakis

The chair under Grady Pemberton's body is too small for how big the world felt one minute ago. There was a locker room smell still in his nose, tape and menthol, and a text from a woman whose name you never bothered to learn because Grady never had to bother. Twenty-eight years old, hands that could still do the one thing they were built for, and it was already boring you the way all the good ones eventually bore you — the ease of it, the way doors just opened. You sat down at his kitchen table, which was really a table in a condo he barely lived in, and you thought: one minute. That's all he got. That's not even a story. You want a story. You open the laptop still logged into the wheel from three hours ago and you spin it before the boredom can talk you out of it, because you already know it never does.

The fork is halfway to your mouth and then it is not going anywhere, because the mouth is not the one that sent it there. You feel the weight arrive all at once — shorter, thicker through the middle, a low ache already sitting in both knees like it never left. The fork goes back down into the styrofoam container with a small tap. Your shoulders — his shoulders — sag under a coat you didn't put on. Outside the window over the sink it is fully dark, Detroit dark, a gray that gave up on being blue an hour ago. Whatever hour that is here, it is not the hour it was in Atlanta, and the wrongness of it sits in your stomach next to the food.

You shrug the coat off. It slides down arms that know exactly how to do this, elbows bending before you tell them to, and the coat's weight on the hook by the door comes with a flash — a locker, a different coat, twenty years younger, hanging his gun belt up after a shift that went bad in a way he never talks about at home. You sit at the counter stool. The vinyl seat remembers him too, worn to the shape of a man who eats standing up most nights out of habit and only sits when his knees insist.

The fork is in your hand and it is not a stranger's fork. Turning it over — his grip on it, thumb worn to the handle a certain way — you get him at six this morning, buttoning this same shirt, this same navy, sleeve by sleeve, the left cuff always sticking a little at the button because his wrist swells if he sleeps wrong. You get the wedding band going on cold, the way it goes on cold every day for thirty-one years minus the four in between with the first wife, whose name comes up through the ring itself like a smell — Carol — and behind Carol, softer, the one who's waiting up right now watching a show she'll pretend she watched alone, Denise, who married a man with freckles across his nose like a boy and calls it his best feature at fifty-four when she's feeling generous.

The food in your mouth — his mouth — is something with gravy, going lukewarm, and it is the least remarkable thing that has ever tasted this good, because his body has been on its feet twelve hours and this is dinner and this is also, some nights, all of the day he gets. A patrol car at dusk comes back through the belt still cinched at your waist — leaning against the door panel, radio traffic low, watching brake lights go red down a wide street of brick two-flats, thinking about his son, who is twenty-two now and doesn't call enough, and how that isn't anybody's fault, it's just what happens.

Your hand — his hand, thick-veined, the ring catching kitchen light — comes up and touches your own cheek without asking permission, the way it always does, tracing along a scatter of freckles that a woman once told him made him look like he never really grew up. It is the last motion his body makes on its own before you take it back for the last bite.

You look down at the hand on the counter. Yours now. It doesn't feel like twenty-eight. It feels like something that has been standing on its feet its whole life and is tired in a way that has nothing to do with tonight.

You lift your eyes to the dark window, where the glass gives you back a face with a low hairline and hazel eyes you didn't choose, and you say, quiet, mostly to see how it sounds coming out of him:

"There you are."