Todd Ostrander

You are twenty and standing in a wrestling room in Philadelphia, and you have been this body for one minute, and already you know it will not do. Danny Fiorillo's knees are good. His shoulders are good. There is a whistle around his neck and a clipboard on the mat and a kid in front of you waiting for a correction on his sprawl, and none of it is interesting, because Danny Fiorillo has never once in his life needed anything he doesn't already have, and there is no pleasure in wearing a man who isn't missing something. You spun him last time out of curiosity about young and strong. You are already bored of young and strong. You want the ache back. You want a body that's paying for something. Your thumb — his thumb, the one you're borrowing — finds the phone in your gym shorts without asking permission from the kid still waiting on the mat, and you open the page with the wheel on it, and you spin.

The organ note dies mid-chord and the whole chapel rises like a tide going the other way, and you rise with it, half a beat late, and the coat is heavier than any coat you have owned in a hundred and thirty men. Paper in your left hand. Order of service, gone soft at the fold already, like it's been opened and closed a dozen times in the last ten minutes out of nothing to do with your hands. You are looking down. Everyone near you is looking down. Nobody turns to see the half-beat you were late.

The coat first — it isn't yours, hasn't been yours in years, borrowed from the hall closet where it's hung since a wedding you can't place, and the shoulders sit a little wrong on this frame the way they always have, and there's a whole small complaint that arrives with it, a familiar one: *gotta get my own black coat one of these years, gotta stop borrowing Dale's*. The buttons under your fingers are ones a hand has done up a thousand times without watching itself do it. That's the first thing — how much of him is in things that don't think.

Then the paper. Cheap stock, a smear of toner where somebody's printer ran low, and it comes up through your fingers like heat off asphalt: a name on the front that isn't yours, a face you don't get to keep, a man from the crew, ten years older, gone off a ladder in April rain onto concrete that didn't care how careful he generally was. You feel the specific guilt of a foreman who was two towns over, on another job, when it happened, and who has been rehearsing the sentence *there was nothing you'd have done differently* every night since and not believing it once.

The scar over your eyebrow itches without being touched, which is its own kind of memory — a nail gun, nineteen years old, a summer job that turned into the only job, blood in your eye and a joke you made about it before you'd even sat down for the stitches, because that's what you did with fear then and mostly still do now.

Your earlobe is cold where the hoop sits — Rachel put it in, first year married, dared you at a bar and then wouldn't let it go, and you wore it home to her mother's table and took the whole dinner of her mother's face for it and never once regretted it.

The tattoo is under two layers of coat sleeve and shirt now, but it doesn't need touching, it just arrives — script, a name and a date, the older of your two kids, the year the business almost went under and you got him anyway, got both of them anyway, on a salary that terrified you and a faith that told you not to be terrified, which you have never fully managed. Church every Sunday you can stand up straight for. Doubt every other night of the week that you keep mostly to the truck, mostly to the drive home, mostly to the third can in the cooler on the passenger floor.

The ring. Left hand, plain, warm from your own skin faster than metal should warm — Rachel again, seventeen years of her, the fights about the drinking that you both know are really about the pouch you keep tucking into your lip like it's a smaller sin than the one before it, and under the fights, still, somehow, unbelievably to you some mornings, a woman who irons your good shirt for funerals because she knows you won't do it right.

This morning — the shirt against your back gives it to you last and best, because it's the one still on you. White collared, top button undone under the coat, ironed by her at the kitchen table with the good iron, you standing there in your socks holding your coffee saying you didn't need her to do it, and her saying I know, and doing it anyway, and you letting her, because some mornings you understand exactly what you have and don't know how to say it out loud, so you just stand there in your socks and let your wife iron your shirt for a dead man's funeral and call that love, because it is.

Your jaw is already clenched. It's been clenched the whole service, teeth set the way they set every time a room asks you to feel something in front of people, and your hand — you notice this only now, only from outside it — has been working the folded paper into a soft, damp, ruined little square without your permission the entire time.

You look down at that hand.

You turn it over, like it might belong to someone standing behind you.

"—the hell," you say, quiet, to no one, into a chapel full of people who are all, mercifully, still looking down.