Vincent Halloran

Cody Fenwick's knees are bad at thirty, which is the kind of joke his body likes to make on him around noon on a Thursday, standing in the gravel lot behind a half-framed duplex with a nail gun heavy in his off hand and the foreman already three trailers away, already forgetting he exists. You have been him for less than a minute and you already know the whole shape of the day ahead: the studs, the heat, the radio bolted to the sawhorse playing a station nobody chose, dinner at his mother's because his check won't clear till Friday. It isn't bad. It is just small, and you have been small before, in other men, and the smallness always finds the same door out of you — the phone in the truck cupholder, the site already bookmarked, the wheel already loaded because some other part of you left it that way weeks ago, waiting for exactly this kind of Thursday to get tired in.

You don't decide so much as arrive at the decision already made, the way Cody's knees arrived at hurting. You thumb it open. You spin.

The bed is close and low under your hands and your knees are on hardwood, not gravel, and there is no nail gun, there is a nightstand with a clock reading past noon in red digits, and your mouth is already moving through the last word of something, *amen*, said a half-beat before you meant it, said out of habit more than faith, and you were rising — you feel that in the thighs, the push already started — and then the wanting to kneel back down arrives from somewhere that isn't the muscle, and you go back down onto both knees like something has asked you to reconsider. Forehead nearly to the bedspread. Breath caught mid-exhale. A smile dying on a face you don't own yet, cooling like a coal.

The t-shirt is soft and worn at the collar, washed some hundreds of times, and it's the first thing that gives you anything: navy cotton against your back and a flash of a dresser drawer, the shirt folded there by a woman's hands — not the girlfriend's, older than that, an ex-wife's hands, years back, the fold still holding out of habit long after she stopped folding anything of his. Under your knees, sweatpants, and in them a whole cold morning comes up at once: the man who owns this body doesn't sleep past six no matter what, hasn't in years, retirement didn't fix that, nothing fixes that. He wakes, he makes coffee too strong for one cup, he sits on the stoop below and watches Court Street get its Thursday going, garbage trucks, a woman walking two dogs who are not the same speed. He likes the cold outside more than the heat inside the apartment. He has always been this age, somehow, even when he wasn't.

Your palms are laced together loosely on the bedspread and that touch is the deepest one — his hands know this position, the elbows know exactly how far to bend, forty years of it, altar boy first, obligation later, something more honest now that nobody's watching and there's no reason left to fake it except that he likes, on some Thursdays, having somewhere to put the noise in his head before it starts. He wasn't praying for anything in particular. He was praying the way you hum. He was thinking, underneath the Latin cadence his mouth still remembers from a boy's mouth sixty years ago, about Denise — not his ex-wife, the recent one, the one after the marriage ended and after the one after that too, the one whose voicemail he hasn't erased — and about Carol who he's seeing now, who left her toothbrush here Tuesday, a small blue flag of something almost like permanence. He was thinking, distantly, of his kids — three of them, grown, scattered, one who calls every Sunday and two who don't, and he doesn't hold it against the two, not really, not out loud.

Skinny arms, a little cold at the wrist where the t-shirt sleeve rides up; a body that doesn't ache exactly but announces itself, hip first, then the left knee, a body that has done nothing today harder than kneel and will do nothing harder than stand back up. Freckles under your eyes when you glance down at the bedspread close enough to see thread — a whole life of sun on a face that got less handsome and more weathered in about equal measure, and he never minded, Denise used to trace them with a finger like counting something.

The clock reads on past the half hour. Somewhere three states west a nail gun is being picked back up by nobody, by absence, by a body with no one steering it anymore, and you have already stopped thinking about that the way you always stop thinking about the one before.

You lift your head off the bedspread. Your hands come apart, and you look at them — his hands, spotted, thin-veined, freckled to the knuckle, a wedding ring gone from one finger long enough that there's no mark left to prove it was ever there.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice you didn't choose and are already fond of. "Okay. Let's see what You've got today."