Wade Kessler

I am leaving Nikhil Menon because of the coffee.

Not the coffee. The way he stood at the counter in the gray before work, the kettle ticking, and I realized I had been standing there for four minutes with nothing in me wanting anything. He is thirty-three and his knees are perfect. His screens are full of code that makes sense to me now, and a woman named Priya had texted him twice that I hadn't answered, because her name moved nothing in me. Under his green eyes there is a faint tiredness that is not mine. I had been him less than a minute when I understood how fast a good body goes flat. So I put the cup down, opened the page with the wheel on it, and paid.

The wheel turns. Philadelphia goes out like a pulled plug.

Dust. Cold air with a bite of manure and creosote in it. My hands are already moving, a chain in the left, the rust of it gritty against the pad of the thumb, and the motion goes wrong. The link slips, and I catch it, and then I do it again slowly, and right. Then ten more times, each one checked, because I do not trust a body that does this without me. A lamp burns yellow on the barn wall. Cattle shift and breathe behind me, and the whole ground hums with their weight.

My right leg is bouncing. It was bouncing before I came, and it does not stop.

The shirt comes first. Its cuffs are soft with a thousand washings, and my wrist turns against the snap and gives me a kitchen: a woman's back at the stove, the light not yet up, and him buttoning one cuff with his teeth because the other hand holds a baby's bottle. The baby is not a baby now. That was years ago. Three children have worn through this house, and he thinks of them in the order they were born, as though counting heads at the gate.

The chaps are stiff leather, stained dark at the thighs. The buckle at the hip remembers, and I feel him cinch it in the dark, the cold of the garage, the radio low so it won't wake anyone, and a prayer said under his breath with the leather creaking. He never drinks. He did once, a little, a long time ago, and stopped the year his daughter was born. The prayer comes to him easy and ordinary, like checking a tire.

The chain goes cold in my palm. Behind the prayer there is a girl from before, laughing on a truck's tailgate, a girl he did not marry. She is not a wound. She is a window he sometimes looks through and then closes, and I feel him close it.

My back aches in one specific place, low on the left, a rancher's ache, fifty years of lifting. My shoulders are strong. I am short, and solid, and my balance sits low in the boots. The spurs tick when I shift. Under the hat brim my eyebrow itches where the scar splits it, and a memory of a hoof comes up, a gate, a bright white flash, his father's voice saying hold still.

There is money put away. I feel the number as a small, warm weight, enough for one bad year and not two. He is proud of it and afraid of it.

I take my hand off the chain.

The wedding band is plain and worn thin. I turn the hand over. The palm is cracked, brown, and stranger than any I have worn. I lift my eyes to the gray sky, the lamp, the palm trees, the cattle.

"Morning," I say. His voice is low and dry, and it fits me.

The leg keeps bouncing. I wonder how long this one holds before the wanting comes back, and whether I will still be standing here by the time the light comes up.