Roy Ansley

You are standing in a groundskeeper's shed at eleven in the morning, which is the middle of your night, because Paul Ostrowski sleeps the hours a man sleeps when his knees have been kneeling in wet Boston mulch since five. The shed smells like gas and cut grass gone slick in a bucket. You have been him less than a minute and already you know the thing that sent you back: the left knee. Not a memory yet, just a fact arriving on its own, the way pain announces itself before story does — this knee has been bad since March, and it will be bad tomorrow, and it will be bad in April, and no wheel spin is going to fix a fifty-nine-dollar knee brace bought at a CVS. You did not take Paul Ostrowski to mow lawns forever. You took him to feel something else being someone else, and the knee is a small mean reminder that a body, any body, comes with its bill attached. So you set down the trimmer you don't remember picking up, and you go back to the site the way you always go back to it, mid-thought, restless, already bored of a man before his coffee's cold.

The wheel spins. It does not ask permission. It never has.

You are on your side in the dark, and the dark is a different dark — thicker, and outside it there are trees instead of Boston brick, and somewhere far off water is moving over rocks, though you don't know yet that it's a creek, or that there's a footbridge over it, or that this is Tuesday night in Eastern Kentucky while it was Tuesday morning where you left. The thumb that was stopped moves again. It moves faster than he was moving it, flicking through things he'd have lingered on — a dog in someone's yard, an old bandmate's kid's graduation — because you don't care about any of it yet, you're just testing that the hand answers. The light off the phone lays itself along one cheek. Somewhere behind the eyes, a blink that should have happened doesn't.

Then his hand — Roy's hand, though you don't have the name yet — closes slightly on the phone, and that's the first key. A flash: this exact phone, cracked in the corner from where it slid off a table at the Sizzlin' Skillet eight months ago, Darla behind the register saying *that's coming out of your tips, hon* and laughing so it wouldn't sting. Roy Ansley, fifty-five years old, on his feet by ten a.m. flipping chairs down off the tables of a restaurant that used to be a Long John Silver's and still smells a little like fryer oil no matter how many years pass, waiting tables to people who call him "young man" out of a kindness he stopped correcting. The shirt against your back — thin, soft, gone see-through at the shoulder blades from washing — gives you the morning he bought it, a Walmart in Pikeville, buying three of the same shirt because picking clothes had become, after the divorce, a decision he no longer had the appetite for.

The sweatpants at your calf carry a year whole: the year Carol left, which wasn't sudden, which was more like a kettle you don't notice coming to boil until the room's full of steam. Two kids — a daughter in Lexington who calls on Sundays now instead of never, a son who works construction outside Knoxville and texts more than he calls — and a house that got sold and split, and an apartment after that with a mattress on a frame Roy put together himself with an Allen wrench that came in the box, and did it right, the way he does most things right, quietly, without an audience.

The ring finger — bare now, has been bare three years, but the tan line is still there like a memory the skin refuses to let go of — gives you the wedding itself, briefly, sideways: Carol in her mother's dress taken in at the waist, a reception in a Moose lodge, dancing badly on purpose to make her laugh. Then it's gone, folded back under, because that's not what the hand wanted to tell you. What the hand wants to tell you is smaller and stranger: three years ago, a night doubled over on this same mattress, a stone moving through him like a lit match dragged slow behind the navel, and driving himself to the ER in Prestonsburg with the wheel wandering because he couldn't sit up straight, and being fine, being fine after, being the kind of fine that comes back to check on you every so often just to prove it never really left.

The mattress under you is the same one he built the frame for. It's thin in the middle from ten years of one man's weight settling always in the same six inches. Your — his — body: fifty-five, skinny fat, the kind of soft that isn't laziness, it's forty years of restaurant food eaten standing up and no gym membership and a metabolism that quit caring around fifty. The shoulders know a tray weight without thinking about it; even lying down, some readiness sits coiled in them, the crook of the elbow shaped by ten thousand plates carried the same way. The knees are fine — better than Paul Ostrowski's ever were, which feels, absurdly, like a small mercy you didn't ask for.

Outside, through the wall, the creek keeps making its noise, and you understand without being told that this room is close enough to hear it, that there's a footbridge somewhere near here with cables that hum a little in wind, that green shade falls over brown water in the part of the day you are not currently in.

You look at the hand holding the phone. It's wider through the palm than the last one, softer at the knuckle, the tan line pale and stubborn on the ring finger like a scar that isn't a scar. You turn it over once, like you're checking it's real, though you already know it is — that's never been the question.

You lift your eyes off it, into the dark of the room, toward wherever a lens would be if there were one, and you say, quietly, like you're only half awake and don't quite believe you're the one saying it:

"Guess I'm still here."