Roy Alcide

You are leaving Joseph Whitehorse because of a hose.

It is the middle of the morning and the bay is wet, and the foam brush is still in your hand, and a woman in a gray sedan has just told you, kindly, that you missed a streak. You didn't. You can feel that you didn't. But the body you are wearing, twenty-nine years old and five-foot-five and entirely agreeable, only says sorry, and it says it before you can stop it. It has been saying sorry for less than a minute. You do not want a man who says it first. You want to see what the next one says.

The wheel is already turning behind your eyes.

Then the floor is wood, and it is cool, and your bare feet are on it. Your left hand is lifting toward your chest and stops there, flat, over ribs that rise and fall slower than the last man's did. The window is full of white light and the room smells of old plaster, sheets, and coffee from somewhere down the hall.

The shirt is pale blue and soft from washing. Its collar touches your neck and the memory comes up through the cotton. It is not yours: he stands here every Thursday, the church-clothes shirt, the one he wears when the shop is closed to him and he is going to sit across from someone and ask for something. His thumb knows the buttons. He did them in the dark so as not to wake her, and got one wrong, and does not know it.

The tie hangs against your sternum, cool silk. Through it comes his father's hands, big, patient, knotting one around a boy's neck in a hallway, saying *over, around, and through*. Three children later he still does it his father's way, and he is proud of that and a little ashamed of how proud.

The floor under your feet remembers things. This board creaks, so he walks the left edge. The nightstand has a drawer that sticks, and in it is an envelope with a number written on the back, sixty thousand and some, saved a little at a time, not touched. A Friday-night candle, a gap-toothed grin at a grandchild, the girlfriend's laugh coming through a wall.

Your fingers are drumming against your chest. You did not tell them to. They do it when he is thinking, and he is always thinking.

His knees ache a little. His belly sits soft and warm over the belt. His back remembers every car he has ever lain beneath. There is nothing to be sorry for in him. He has never once apologized for a streak.

You look at your hands. Brown, wide, the calluses ridged across the palms like old rope. You turn them over. The buttons come undone under your thumbs and go back up straight, and the tie knots itself the way no one in this closet has ever tied it. You look up, into whatever is looking back.

"Well," you say, and the gap in your teeth whistles it. "Good morning."

The room says nothing. The street outside steams. You wonder how long you get to be a man who is not sorry, and whether the wanting will come back by lunch.