Terrance Lewis Mabry

The man I am wearing has a bad left knee and a wedding ring tan he never earned, and I have been standing in his kitchen for twelve minutes deciding. His wife's coat is on the hook. The refrigerator hums. Kowalski's thumbs are soft and quick on the cold edge of the counter, and none of it is wrong, and none of it is enough. Tonight I opened his laptop and found the folder of his father's voicemails, forty-one of them, and I played the first one, and it was only a man asking whether the gutters had been cleaned. I wanted to cry for him and could not find where it lived in me. That is the thing he cannot do for me. He has the grief and I have the key to it and they do not fit. So I pay. The wheel turns the way it always turns, a little too long, and then there is no kitchen.

There is a bed. There is a phone six inches from my face and my thumb is stopped mid-scroll on something I do not care about. The room is dark except for the blue on my cheek, and I am lying on my side with my knee drawn up, and my breath goes out of me long and even, a man's who thought he was alone. Then my thumb starts again, faster and steadier than it was, flicking past everything he had stopped on.

The sheet is under my bare foot, cool, a little rough, washed too many times. The shirt against my ribs is soft cotton gone thin at the collar, and as I breathe it in the cloth gives me his morning: standing at a closet, the left sleeve first, the way he always does, because his right shoulder clicks and he wants it last. A gray quarter-zip pulled over his head in a dark apartment, the zipper cold at his throat, a coil of blue cable in the fist of his hand and the day ahead of him, the long aisles of cold air and fans, the rack door open, the cables fanned out like a hand of cards. He liked that. He liked untangling what other people left.

The phone is warm. When I thumb the glass I get a name that is not on the screen, a woman's, and a wave of something that is not mine: a kitchen with the heat off, her keys set down too carefully, and him saying fine, fine, fine until the word wore through. Four weeks ago. The pillow beside me still holds the shape of nobody. He has been lying here with that.

My free hand lifts without my asking and runs over my scalp, the long gray curls on top, the hard clipped edge at the sides under my palm like a seam. His hand knows it. Under it, a church basement, folding chairs, coffee burned bitter, a hymn he sang off-key and meant, his knees pressed to the floor. Faith, in him, is a room he still goes into when he is frightened. I am not frightened. I stand at the door of it anyway.

The body is solid. Five-five, dense through the shoulders and arms, built by hauling racks and by pushing weight in a garage under the house, where the light is cold and white and the driveway tilts down steeply to the door. Thirty-eight years sit in the lower back with a low, patient ache. The stubble itches along my jaw. Somewhere on my cheek is the mole everyone looks at first. A vape sits on the nightstand and my fingers know the exact distance to it. Scraping by, I understand without numbers: a bank balance he checks like a pulse.

I stop thumbing. The screen dims. I hold my hand up in the blue and turn it over, callus at the base of each finger, a nick of old weather across the knuckle, and then I lift my eyes, and I say it into the dark, to whoever is listening, to the lens of the ceiling:

"All right. Let's see how long you last."

I do not know whether I mean the hand, or the night, or me.