Stephen Keller Doyle

You are in Gary Petrosino's kitchen, and the light through the blinds is the color of dishwater. It is early, Sunday, and the whole building is quiet. Forty-seven days in him. His knees have opinions about the linoleum. His back has a ledger of every couch he ever carried up a stairwell, and it reads you the total each morning before you are allowed coffee.

You were not unhappy. That is what you would say if anyone asked, and nobody will. But yesterday you stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a dresser on your shoulders, and the body that was supposed to do it simply declined. It was not pain. It was a door closing, politely, in a house you did not know had a door there. You set the dresser down and sat on the third step, and the young guy on the other end looked at you the way you look at old dogs. You said nothing. You drank water you did not want.

He is five foot five. You have spent seven weeks looking up at everything. You open the page on his phone and the wheel is there, patient. You pay with his money, which is not much, and you do not feel bad about it, and that is the part you would not say out loud. You touch the screen.

Then a bench under you, hard and wide, and the smell of cold concrete and old rubber. Your forearms are on your knees. A bottle sweats by your foot. The breath in your chest is heavy and slow, and your jaw is clenched so tight your teeth ache. You unclench it. It clenches again. Habit lives here.

The bench is rough under your thumbs, splintered at the edge, and something rises through the wood. A Saturday, a garage, him holding a plank steady while a man he loved cut it, sawdust in the sun. A father, or a man who stood in for one. The feeling is plain and brown and warm, and it is not yours.

The flannel cuffs are damp at the wrist. Your fingers find the button and the morning comes up through it. A bungalow porch, mountains over the rooflines still blue. He stood there buttoning this shirt, left sleeve first, because he always does the left first. He was thinking he would do the long set today, and then do the lawn for the neighbor with the bad hip, and then nothing, a whole empty Sunday. He was thinking he was all right. He was thinking it carefully, the way you carry a full cup.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. Under your right thumb, on the ring finger, the skin is smooth and pale where a band used to sit, and the flash comes whole and sudden. A kitchen, a woman's back at the sink, the sound of the tap. He said something small and wrong, and she did not turn around. He has gone over that sentence for years. It does not get better. It is the heaviest thing in him, and you hold it a moment and put it down gently, like something that could still break.

On the back of your hand the ink is raised a little under your thumb. A name. A date. You know what it is before you read it, because your chest knows, and you will not say it. It is a grief with a small and ordinary shape, and it fits his hand exactly.

You stand. The legs are thick and strong, a lifetime of ladders in them, and the shoulders are warm and loose, and under the fat is real muscle. A good machine, tired in the lower back. Your fingertips want the bar. They already know the width of it.

You look at your hands. You turn them over. Big, scarred at the knuckle, steady.

You look up and say, quietly, to nobody, "Okay. Hi."

The jaw clenches again on its own. You wonder how long you get, and whether tomorrow you will still be his.