Vikram Hadley

You leave Alan Pierzchala's body the way you leave a warm car: all at once, with the cold already waiting. His hands were good hands. They knew where the keyboard ended and the coffee began. You had him less than a minute, and in that minute you stood in his kitchen in Detroit and opened a drawer you had no right to, and found it neat, and found a letter under the neatness, and understood that he was a man who kept things. Something in you went flat. You had a body that worked and nothing in it you wanted, only a stranger's tidy grief. So you pay, and you spin.

Then the wheel stops and you are standing in the rain.

You are already stepping. One foot has left the shelter and the runoff is over the toe of a boot, and the hood is going back off your head under a hand that is doing it for you. Water finds the thin place on top where the hair lies flat. It runs down the scalp, the temples, and the jaw, which is smooth and freshly shaved and stings a little. Your face is tipped up into it. The arrivals board behind you says 3 MIN and you do not turn around.

Cold. Then not cold. You stand there like a man who has not been cold in a long time, and you do not know yet whether that is yours or his.

The jacket collar is stiff and wet against your neck, and the nylon of it goes through your fingers. Pulling the zipper tab brings him up.

A closet in a narrow hallway. Early, the radiator knocking. He takes the jacket off the hook because the other one, the good wool, was hers to pick, and he has not picked for himself in two winters. He puts in the left arm, then the right, shrugging, bad shoulder second. The zipper sticks halfway and he swears softly at it, fond, as she would have. In the lining pocket his thumb finds a folded receipt from a hardware store. He keeps it. He does not know why. You do.

Under the L tracks a train goes over, iron on iron, and your breastbone hums with it. The sound is a place. Forty years of it through the window of a flat on a street with brick on both sides, a woman's voice raised over the noise, laughing, and two children asleep through all of it. He loved that it never woke them.

The ring is on your left hand and the rain makes it slick. Your right thumb turns it without being asked, a habit worn deeper than any thought. Her hands again, small, cold at the knuckles, putting it on him in a room with a window that wouldn't close. Then the long middle part. A hospital corridor, vending-machine coffee. Her name, which arrives like something swallowed whole, and you cannot say it yet.

Your nose has a catch in it when you breathe in. Broken once, set a little crooked. A flash of a boy's fall off a fence, a white-hot crack, a father's thick fingers pressing it straight in a kitchen. You breathe through it and it whistles faintly.

Dad-bod weight sits low and comfortable. The knees ache in the wet, a dull, honest ache. A drink or two most evenings has left his liver patient and his temper soft. He quit smoking, and your mouth remembers wanting it. The longing comes up out of the lungs, small and cruel.

Money, too, somewhere behind it all, quiet as a held breath. He never spent it on himself.

You look at your hands. The ring. The knuckles beaded with rain. You turn the right one over, palm up, and the water pools in it.

You look up into the rain and say, out loud, in a voice that is deeper and slower than you expected, "Well. Hello, Vikram."

The bus is coming. You do not know how long you get to stand here, or when the wanting returns.