Russell Tiemeyer

You are in Frank Dombrowski's kitchen in Queens with the light off, standing at the counter in his socks, and the black coffee has gone cold in your hand. Two days and two hours. His belly presses the edge of the counter, a soft weight you have stopped noticing and now notice. The stubble on his jaw itches. Down the hall his alarm has not gone off yet, and the whole apartment is waiting to tell him what to do with a Monday: the train, the lanyard, the gray cubicle, the eleven-forty meeting about a spreadsheet. He is good at it. He is patient with it. That is the trouble. Yesterday you stood at his window and watched a man across the street carry a ladder up a fire escape, and you wanted the ladder. Not the man. The reach. You set the cup down and open the page, and the wheel is there, turning, ready. Goodbye, Frank. You were kind to me.

The wheel stops, and the floor is gone and then it is a different floor.

Cold concrete through the soles of boots. A pull in the shoulders. Your hands are in dough, both of them, the heel of one pressing forward while the other turns the round a quarter. A stroke ago it was habit. Now it is yours, and you get it wrong, a half-second stumble, the fold catching. You do it again slowly and it comes out right. The next one you check. Every one, as if it might fail you.

Then the apron. Canvas, stiff with old flour, the strap rubbing the back of your neck, and it opens something. His wife's hands knotting that strap at the back, years ago, laughing because he'd tied it crooked. Three children's heights on a doorframe at home, penciled, the youngest still under the line. The shirt cuffs are rolled twice, and the cloth under your fingers gives you this morning: the buttons done in the dark so as not to wake her, the left sleeve first, the ring catching on the placket, his thumb turning it once the way he does. He does not pray. But he stands at the bedroom window every day and looks at the sky for a minute, and calls it nothing, and it is not nothing.

The dough is warm and alive, and under it the table is scarred wood that remembers him. The flour smell goes in deep and brings a woman up from underneath it, thin and laughing in a different town, a summer before the marriage, the one who got away. No bitterness in him. Just a small bright stone he turns over sometimes in the dark kitchen. A cigar on the back step on his birthday. A savings account, modest, guarded like a pilot light.

Your body is lean, wiry, forty-four, and the lower back has an opinion about hour four. The knees are fine. The forearms are strong in a way that was never made at a gym. Your right thumb has gone to the cuticle of your first finger, picking, and you stop it, and it starts again.

Through the window a thunderhead stacks black over the stubble fields, and the sky has gone the color of old brass. The loaves cool on the rack, ticking.

You lift your hands out of the dough and look at them. Pale with flour, a plain band on the left. You turn them over. Then you look up.

"Well," you say, in a voice you have never used. "Let's see how long this one holds."