Thomas Keegan

Samir Haddad's thumb is on the button in the cab of a parked truck, and the wheel has not yet turned. Three hours of dock lines sit in his back. His beard itches when he sweats. For an hour he has been trying to make a phone call to his mother, and he can't make his voice do the thing it should, and she would hear it. The mouth is a good mouth and the voice is a good voice. It will not say what she wants. Somebody else could. You press.

The fork stops. Cold air, a window going white at the edge. Rice and something salty on your tongue, the plastic edge of a container pressing into the heel of your left hand. A coat is zipped to your chin and you are warm inside it. Your belly is round and solid against the counter. Everything is a different size.

The coat first. The nylon is stiff at the cuffs, gritty. Under your thumb a small burn hole, melted smooth. Memory comes up through it, his and not yours: five in the morning, the zipper, the way he bent to tie the left boot first because the right knee complains. He put the coat on at the shop door in the dark, and again just now, and never took it off, because the radiator in this kitchen has been dead since February and he has not called anyone.

The ring. It turns under your thumb, loose at the knuckle, worn thin on one side. A woman's laugh in a car. A hospital corridor, the vending machine humming, a nurse saying his name wrong. Her name is inked on the inside of his forearm with a date. You do not look yet. You feel the date from inside him, a weight, a shut door.

The fork is a cheap plastic one. He has been eating standing since she died, because the table has two chairs.

The counter edge, laminate worn pale where he leans. Envelopes under his hip. Bills, a card from a daughter, a phone number for a son written large, as if he might forget it. He never calls first. The pride is his, thick as gravel. Heat comes up through his hands from nothing: sparks on a concrete floor, a bead laid clean down a seam, the quiet of it. Forty years of it. His back knows the stoop, the stairs, the wet street. His shoulders ache and are strong. Your knuckles want to crack, and you let them, and the sound is a comfort that is not yours.

He does not drink. He prays, badly, in the car. The thought arrives and stays, strange and tender.

You set the fork down on the counter. You look at your hand, the freckled back of it, the ring, the thick fingers. You turn it over. Then you look up into the dark window and say, quietly, "Okay."

Your mother's voice is still waiting somewhere in Chicago. How long will this one hold? The wanting is already stirring, small, patient.