Tom Pelletier

Brian Seitz's knees are done for the night. That's the first thing, and it's the thing I take with me out of him: forty-two years of other people's bathrooms, the bend and the reach, and a hotel's worth of tight sheet corners that never end. I've had him less than a minute and already I know where he hurts. The freckled forearms. The motel soap smell that lives in his skin. The brown eyes keep looking at the phone in his hand, where the page is open and the wheel is waiting.

Nothing is wrong with him. He's the problem. He's a fine body, heavy and reliable, and he has been a lamp I'm tired of sitting under. Last time I stood at a window and wanted to be someone whose evening had weather in it. So I press the button, and Ohio goes out.

Light. A bright frame, a half second of white, and I'm sitting up straight on a couch in the dark. A remote is in my right hand, and I set it down on the couch arm. The room is cold at the edges. Salt is in the air, somehow, under the dust smell of old cushions. On the screen a man is saying something, and the audience laughs, and I do not.

My back is pressed to the cushion, and it gives me the flannel first. The flannel remembers that this morning it hung on a nail by the door, stiff with cold. He took it down with his left hand, the ring knocking the wood. He thought about nothing, then about his daughter's science fair, then about nothing. The sleeve slides over a tattoo I haven't looked at yet. The feeling is not mine: it is plain contentment, a man who likes his own mornings.

The jeans, heavy with the day, hold sap and bark in the thighs. Through them I get a rope under his palms, an oak so wide that two men couldn't circle it, the whole canopy creaking over him like a ship. He's thirty feet up and happy. His hands know a knot I could not tie; they are curling now, on the couch arm, around nothing, tying it.

My tongue finds the toothpick before I know it's there. Pine and mint. Under it, a ghost of smoke, nine years quit, and the wanting still arrives like an old friend knocking. A woman's laugh comes with it, not his wife's. A summer, a dock, a girl who left for Portland and didn't write. He has never told anyone he still drives past her mother's house. The ache is mild and well kept. It is the oldest thing in him.

The ring is warm. Under my thumb it brings his wife, in this very room, her feet in his lap, saying his name as though it were a small joke only they shared. Then church on Sunday, a hard pew, his daughter's shoe swinging. A prayer he means. Money in a coffee can and an account, enough to be careful about, not enough to stop.

My own belly rests against the waistband, soft and settled. My back aches in a clean, earned way. I'm forty-one, and I feel strong in the arms and shoulders, the dimples tugging at my cheeks even though nothing's funny.

I lift my hands into the TV light. Ink on the left forearm, a rose, a swallow, a banner with a name I don't know yet. The ring on its finger. I turn them over. The knuckles are scarred pale with work.

I look up at the dark window and say, "Well. Hello."

Somewhere under the wanting, already, the page is open again. I can't tell whether it's four minutes or four years.