Terrence Oyelaran

You are standing at a kitchen window in Leonard Tackett's life, and the coffee is going cold in his big square hand. Outside, the hollow is still blue. The line doesn't start for an hour. He has been fifty-three for a lifetime and you have had him for less than a minute, and already the knees complain on the stairs and the dimples show in the black glass of the window. This is the reason you are leaving. You asked the shirt on the hook for something, anything, and it gave you a boy's first paycheck, a bad winter, a funeral, and you felt each one as a weight that was never yours. You wanted to be a man who lifts nothing. The body is fine and the wanting is not. It never is. You set the cup on the sill, you wake the phone, you pay, and the wheel goes round.

Then the board clicks to 48, and your knee stops.

You are sitting third from the door, under a strip light that hums in your back teeth. A paper cup is in your fingers, the water gone warm, and you set it down square on the molded seat beside you. You fold your hands. Someone has called a name, and it is the name on you, and you do not look up. You are too tall for the chair. Your knees ride high and your boots sit flat on speckled tile.

The hoodie comes first. The cotton is worn soft at the cuffs, and the zipper teeth press cold against your sternum. Through it comes a hand, his, in the dark at five a.m. in a rowhouse hallway. The hand finds the hoodie on the newel post, and the stair carpet is rough under his socks. A small voice upstairs says *Daddy, boots*, and he says *I got them, baby*. You feel it as a tenderness that goes straight through the ribs. The beard is a warm weight on your chest, and your fingers go to it and comb it once, the way he does when he is afraid.

The jeans are stiff at the thigh. His knee bounced all morning against them. You find the reason in the pocket, a folded paper, and when your thumb finds the crease it opens a month of mail. It is the letter about the field, the contract, the city cutting the crew, and a number on a page that he read at the kitchen table after the kids were down. His wife sat across from him and slid her hand over his, with the ring under it, and said *we'll figure it out.* The metal is warm on your finger. Under the tile, your boots remember grass: the stripes laid in diagonals at dawn, the stands empty, the mower's long drone, and the one clean hour when the field was entirely his and he talked quietly to his father, dead six years. Your forearm itches where the ink is, and you turn it. The portrait is his father, in gray, in the crook of the arm. Under it the skin remembers the needle and remembers weeping in the chair and being glad.

Here is the body, plainly. It is thirty-three and strong through the back and thighs, a little stiff in the left shoulder from the mower. It is hungry and slightly sour from too much bourbon the night before, one glass too many, and a tightness sits under the breastbone. Underneath the pride, he is scared. He is here for something about the job, or the insurance, or the number on the paper. You do not get to know. The board will not tell you.

You lift your hands and look at them. They are enormous, freckled across the knuckles, and the ring turns easily. You turn them over and the palms are scarred with a lifetime of handles. You lift your eyes.

"Forty-eight," you say, to the room that doesn't answer, in his deep voice. "Let's see how long this one lasts."