Walter Brzezinski

You are leaving Nicholas Guidry, who has been yours for nineteen minutes. The apartment in New Orleans is dark and everyone in it is asleep. You stand at the kitchen counter in his bare feet with his phone lit in your hand. His beard itches. His knees are small and neat and nothing hurts. He is a fine body, and that is not the trouble.

The trouble is the drawer by the sink. You opened it to look for a bottle opener and found a stack of birthday cards in a woman's handwriting. Every one was signed *Mom*, and none had been opened. His thumb knew the drawer, and his shoulders knew what was in it before you did. A grief you have no claim to came up through his chest like a bubble. You did not pay for that. You paid for a man, and he has turned out to be a house, with rooms you would have to live in.

So you thumb the page open, and the wheel turns.

It is a street, wet and black, and you are already walking. One shoe scuffs every third step. You stumble off the kerb and your hand slaps cold wet metal, a parked car, and you catch yourself. You are big and heavy and tilting, and the whiskey comes up your throat like a second pulse.

Then the jacket gives you the morning. It is canvas, stiff at the cuffs, with a corduroy collar rubbing your neck. A man's hands, his hands, button the plaid shirt under it. There is the kitchen, with a window over the sink and a water tower out past the wire. A woman's voice says, *You're not working tonight, Walt, you're just going to sit there.* The coffee has gone cold, and he never told her he was frightened of the bills.

The belt is tight on the last hole. Under it his belly sits heavy and warm. His bad knee talks every time the shoe drags. Your leg is bouncing even while you stand still, a nervous tick he has carried for forty years, and you cannot make it stop.

Your right hand finds the ring. A plain band, worn thin on the underside, and the memory comes up whole. A church basement, folding chairs, a girl in blue laughing at something he said. He is twenty-six and certain of everything.

There is a second memory behind it, an older one. A different girl in a car with the dome light on, crying. He has not thought of her in years, and he thinks of her now, drunk, two in the morning, walking the long way so he doesn't have to go home yet.

The keys in his pocket are cold and jagged against his thigh. They remember the restaurant's back door, a Friday full of tickets, the host stand and the pen in his pocket. They remember hands that shook before open and steadied after the first pour.

You stand up straight. The leg stops bouncing. The next steps come even and quiet.

At the corner you could turn right for the gravel road, the wire and the porch light. You turn left.

You lift his hand into the lamplight, turn it over and look at the ring, the knuckles, the pale palm. Then you look up at the dark street ahead.

"All right," you say, in his low gravel voice. "Let's see how long you last."