Tommy Gallagher

You are leaving Walter Lombardi, and he has been yours for two minutes.

Two minutes is long enough to find out what he is. The beard itches under your jaw. The belly sits over the belt like a held breath. His scalp feels the air-conditioning on every bare inch. You sit in his chair in his kitchen on a Sunday morning, and what sent you back to the wheel is small and stupid: his phone lights up on the table, a name you do not know, *Dad?? call me*, and you understand that a whole life is waiting to be answered, and it is not yours. You do not want to be anyone's son this morning. You want a body that nobody is expecting. You press the screen dark with his thumb and spin.

Then green light, and a coin on your thumb.

It is the same second. The coin leaves your thumb and comes down without turning once, and the water takes it inward, wrong, folding toward the middle, and then it is gone. You stand at the lip of the fountain with your breath in a chest that was breathing a moment ago without you. Concrete cold against your thighs. The mall is closing around you. Somewhere a gate rattles down, and the skylight over you has gone the color of dishwater.

The hoodie comes first. The zipper is half up, the cuffs gone soft and thin, and when your fingers find the drawstring the memory arrives in his feeling, not yours: a cold hallway, a woman's voice from the other room, *you're wearing that again*, and a warmth of being known, so sharp it is nearly shame. Her name is Dana. Not the girlfriend. The other one, the old one, the ex who still matters, and the hoodie was hers to hate once. He kept it anyway.

Your hand goes to your mouth without being told, and your tongue finds the gap where the front tooth should be. A basketball, a cousin's elbow, a driveway in August, and the laugh he laughed afterward with his mouth full of blood, because he was seventeen and it was funny. He never fixed it. Money was always going somewhere else. Now a little is put away, enough to fix it, and he has never once spent it on that.

Your thumb moves to the cuticle of your forefinger and picks. It is already raw. His hands do this when he is thinking about the thing he is not thinking about. You feel the sting and the small relief of it.

The jeans carry the morning. He pulled them from the chair in the dark, left the girlfriend asleep, and found one boot under the bed by touch. He stood on the worn marble step outside the rowhouse and watched the first sun come down the block and light the far side of the street. His knees ached from yesterday's ladder. Calluses sit at the base of each finger, and your hands already know the weight of a drop line paying out from a pole. Under it all is the drink. Not last night's, but years of it, a dull gray patience in his stomach. And the cigarettes he quit, which still live in his fingers, one phantom pinch at the edge of the hand.

The coin was for something. You reach for it and it comes in a flash: a wish he made for her, for the one he lives with, for an ordinary Tuesday. He did not even say it aloud. He only thought it.

You hold your hands up to the green light and turn them over. Strong, scarred only by work, picking at themselves. Then you lift your eyes, and you say to the empty mall, in a voice that is not yours yet:

"Okay. Okay, Tommy."

Underneath, quiet as the water: how long. Until the wanting comes back. Until tomorrow, or in four minutes.