Russell Dunleavy

You are standing in Walter Kwan's kitchen, in the middle of his night, with his bad left knee against the cabinet and a cold cup of tea in his hand. He has been yours for less than a minute. You've already learned him a little: the freight dock, the cough, the way his shoulders curl as though still under a load. You don't want any of it. Nothing's wrong with him. He lifts, he walks, he breathes. But the wheel is open on the phone propped against the sugar jar, and you know why you're back, though you won't say it, not even in his voice. The tea is the answer. It's what he would have made, and you made it without choosing to, and it tastes like a life being lived on your behalf. You press the button.

Seattle arrives as weight. A mattress takes your whole front, and a pillow is wet under your cheek. One arm hangs off the edge and the blood has pooled in it, heavy and tingling. Your breath is ragged, so you pull it even, and the body obeys. Streetlight cuts through a gap in the curtains. You roll onto your back and the hanging arm draws itself up. Your hands fold on your chest, and some distant part of you knows he has never slept this way.

Then the room starts giving him up.

The sheet under your palm is flannel gone thin, and it gives you her side of the bed, empty tonight, her sister's in Tacoma, a phone call, his own relief that he's ashamed of. The shirt on your back is soft cotton, washed a hundred times. You feel him pull it on this evening, the left sleeve first because the right shoulder aches, and then you feel the ache itself, a dull coin of heat under the skin. The ring on your left hand is warm and a little tight at the knuckle. Your thumb finds it and turns it, and you are at a church-basement altar call in 1989, shaking, forty years from tired, saying yes to something. The ink on the right forearm itches. You don't look at it, but your left fingers press it, and a name comes up through the skin, a date, a small cold room, a baby who did not stay. He told no one at work. Pastor knew. She knew. That is all of it, and it is enough to make your chest go tight.

Under the tightness is money. You feel it as a steadiness, not a thing he spent: a house paid off, a sold business, a mornings-on-the-porch kind of quiet. Coffee ring on a rail. Rain. He quit drinking on a Tuesday and never made a speech about it. The mattress is firm beneath your spine, your hips click, your moustache tickles your lip, and your cheeks, even slack, hold their deep creases. He smiled his whole life, and the face remembers.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. Hers is the ring. His are the wide knuckles. The script on the forearm is a name you can read and cannot own. You turn them over, palms up, and look up into the dark.

"Well," you say, in his low, dry voice. "Hello, Russell."

The house ticks. Somewhere down the hall a clock keeps its small count, and you listen to it, wondering whether it's yours, how long, and when the wanting will come back.