Walter Francis Lombardi

You are leaving Leonard Saul Haberman, and it is nothing he did. He is six foot five and the knees ache by ten in the morning, and the paint is in the creases of him, a gray that never washes out. Three minutes you have worn him. Three minutes, and already the long arms feel like a coat cut for someone else. You stand at his window above the street with his coffee cooling and you know the real reason, which is that you hated how quiet his apartment was. Nobody called. Nothing in his pockets belonged to anyone who would. You open the page with the wheel on it. You pay, and you spin.

The organ stops.

The room stands and you stand with it, half a beat late, a big soft weight rising off a wooden pew-end. A crowded chapel, the back of it, light coming gray-gold through tall windows. Wool across your shoulders. A folded paper in your left hand, the paper soft from being held too long.

Your right hand goes to the coat and smooths it down. The buttons are strange. You count them with your thumb, and nobody turns around.

The coat is borrowed. The wool gives you that first, and then the smell of another man's closet, cedar and old rain. It gives you a brother-in-law's hand on this lapel, saying *keep it, it's too big on me now.* The shirt beneath is dark and soft from washing. You get this morning from it, sleeve by sleeve: his fingers fumbling the left cuff because the wedding band catches, a wife's voice from the hall, *you'll be late, Walt,* and the way he stood a second too long at the mirror, not looking at the mole, looking past it.

The paper in your hand gives you the dead. A woman, his first love, an old girlfriend from before everything. Nobody knows he still has her letters in a shoebox. There is no sin in it, only a long tenderness, and now grief he cannot show. Your throat tightens with his feeling, not yours.

Your right thumb starts to move against your fingers, flick, flick, a motion for a lighter that isn't there. Under it comes something warm and ashamed: a pocket lighter he carries though he never smoked, a habit left from the years of drinking, the years he does not drink now. Sober by decision. His wife's hand on the back of his neck in a parking lot. Two kids, grown, somewhere in this room. The lanyard in his bag, sales calls tomorrow, hotel lobbies, a good living and a harder faith. Prayer in the dark, plain as a table.

Under your feet is stone, worn in the aisle. Fifty-five years sit in your lower back. The belly is warm and solid. The breath comes slow and full of incense.

You lift your right hand and turn it over. Thick fingers. The plain gold ring. It is a good hand, and it is yours now, and it is still shaking a little with his sorrow.

You raise your eyes, and the room begins to sing.

"Well," you whisper, "hello, Walter."

Somewhere under the hymn the wanting is already stirring, small as a struck flint. You cannot tell whether it will be a year or this song's last verse.