Walter Bellecourt

You are leaving Caleb Rasmussen because of a pair of sneakers.

It is nothing. A pair of white sneakers on a shelf at the store, size nine, and a woman in the aisle who asked if they came in a different color. You said you would check the back. You stood in the stockroom for a long time with the box in your hands, and you could not make yourself care whether there was another color. Twenty-three years old, freckled, quick, easy to like, and you could not make your quick legs walk back out to her. Now you stand in his dark apartment in Seattle, on his cold floor, with his light brown hair in your eyes and his whole young body humming with a wanting for nothing. You tried it for twenty minutes. The page is open on his phone. The wheel is already turning.

Then the room is gone and you are lying on your side in the dark.

Blue light on one cheek. A phone six inches from your face. Your thumb is stopped mid-scroll, and for one second you let it stay stopped, because the body is heavy and warm and it is the middle of the night and nothing in the world is asking anything of you. Then your thumb starts again, faster and steadier than his was, flicking past everything he had paused on.

The weight comes first. You are heavy in a way Caleb never was, a settled, low weight, the mattress sagging under your hip. Your left leg is bouncing under the blanket, and you did not tell it to. It will not stop. You let it go.

The T-shirt is soft and thin from a thousand washes, and where it lies against your ribs something opens. A Saturday morning, years back. A girl of nine standing in the kitchen doorway in her coat, saying you're late, Dad, you're always late, and you in this shirt, laughing, hunting for your keys. The feeling is pride so thick it hurts, with an old tiredness under it. His daughter. One child. She has a name, and it almost comes.

The blanket is rough wool under your fingers. A different year: a woman's laugh in a car, rain on the windshield, her hand on this same blanket, or one like it. Then the long quiet of the day she left. He never said the thing he meant to say. It has sat in his chest ever since, beside the cigarettes. You feel the want for one now, a hollow behind the breastbone, a pack a day, and your fingers twitch toward the nightstand before you know what they are doing.

His back aches. Sixty years of it, and the forklift in the cold warehouse, the pallets stacked high above him, the jolt of the seat through his spine every working day. You know it through your hips, your knees, the grind in the left shoulder when you shift. His hands are thick, hard-palmed, the calluses rough against the glass of the phone. They know how to feather a lever. They know how to set a load down gently. They are strong, and you can feel that strength even lying still.

The storm door of the triple-decker bangs somewhere below in the wind. Autumn is out there. He knows its sound.

Your thumb stops. You hold the phone away and look at your hand, really look, turning it over in the blue glow: the broad palm, the cracked creases, the knuckles thick as walnuts. Then you lift your eyes and look straight out.

"Hello, Walter," you say, in his low, rough voice.

It sounds like a stranger's. You wonder how long you will have it, whether the wanting will find you here tomorrow, or in an hour, or never at all.