Thomas Brennan

You leave Desmond Achebe-Wynn standing in his kitchen, one hand on a cold marble counter, the house asleep above him. He was good at it, that body. Six-one, a voice that made rooms go quiet. But for forty seconds you stood there and nobody needed anything from you, and the silence had a shape, and the shape was Adrian's, three bodies back. Twenty years old, a bald scalp under your palm, his best friend's name on the phone. You still know the number. You never called it. You pay. You spin.

Cold. Diesel and wet brick. You are mid-motion, right arm out, fingers closing on a steel latch on the side of a trailer, and the trailer is cold through your knuckles. First light is thin and gray at the end of a street of rowhouses. Your breath goes out and doesn't come back quickly; this belly sits against the belt, this chest is wider and slower than you are used to. Your feet know where they are. You have just done something wrong, one motion off, and you do it again slowly, correctly, and the latch seats with a clean clack.

You check it. You check the next. Ten more, each one pressed and tugged, and the fingers do it without you, a man's body doubting a job it has not needed to doubt in years.

The flannel is soft with washing, and the cuff is rolled twice at the right forearm. The sleeve stirs something: a bedroom, still dark, a husband's back turned, the quiet of not waking him. Tom, who is Tom, pulling the shirt from the chair, buttoning it wrong and starting again, one eye on the sleeping shape. Love arrives in your chest like a warm stone. Under the sleeve the half sleeve itches: *Sarah* and a date, and with it a hospital hallway, a sister, a long night he does not say aloud even now. The ring on the left hand is thin from wear. When your thumb turns it, a kitchen: two kids arguing over a cereal bowl, a man laughing at a joke Tom didn't mean, and you feel in your own ribs how much he loves being the one who got laughed at.

The cap's bill is bent from his thumb. The jeans hold the warmth of the cab's seat. Your knees ache on the first step back, a small honest ache, and your lower back remembers six hours of road. A craving flickers near the shirt pocket, a pack that isn't there, a ghost of ten years ago. Beer, once, then not; the fear of it still lives in his hands like a splinter. Eleven dollars in his wallet and no cushion at all, and the dread of that, too, is his, a quiet math he does every month.

And Adrian. Under the thumbnail, the grip of the handle, comes a garage, two boys, a stolen cigarette, Tom at twenty-two laughing so hard he cried. Not the same Adrian you wore. His friend. Somewhere in Houston that bald boy is waking up as himself again, and you are the only one who knows what was in him.

You lift your hand, the left, the ring catching the early light. You turn it over. The palm is rough, a little cracked at the thumb.

You look up the street, where the first sun is coming down the white steps worn hollow, and you say, quietly, "Okay, Tom." The name doesn't feel like yours. You wonder how long it will. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back.