Walter Kasprzak

You are in Gordon Pelletier's chair, and Gordon's coffee has gone cold at your elbow, and you are done with him.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. The knees don't hurt, the blue eyes read the small print, and the spreadsheet on the screen balances to the cent. You sat down in him less than a minute ago and already you can feel the whole smooth, thin, sensible life of him waiting to be lived. It is the middle of a Miami morning, and the air conditioner ticks in the wall. You came to this chair wanting to want something. It isn't there. Something about the quiet in him is a locked door you have no interest in. The wheel is already on the screen, and your finger, his finger, long and clean, is already down.

Then you are kneeling.

The carpet comes up first, rough and warm through the knees of his jeans. Your forearms are on a quilt. Your hands are folded, loose. The amen has just left your mouth, early, and a laugh is still in your chest, and your weight is already rising off your heels. You stop halfway. The smile goes out of your face mid-breath. You come back down onto both knees and put your forehead to the bedspread, because the body is heavy and the room has just arrived.

The quilt smells of dryer sheets and old cotton, and the first memory comes up through your forehead: a woman's hand tucking this very edge under, years ago, saying, Walt, you're on the wrong side again. Her name is Donna. The feeling that comes with it is not yours. It is a settled, wordless gratitude, like a chair you've sat in for thirty years.

Your right hand moves on its own and touches your face. Cheek, jaw. The jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and the hand knows the shave: the cold bathroom, the cheap razor, the nick he always gets under the nose where the bone sits crooked. The nose was broken once. A softball, a summer, a laugh in an emergency room, a doctor saying it would set a little off. You feel the bump with his fingertip and he is, for one second, seventeen and proud of it.

The t-shirt is soft gray, washed thin, and it clings across a belly that has a habit of being patted. The memory comes in through the cotton, sleeve by sleeve. He pulled it from the drawer in the dark an hour ago, after the long night at the lobby desk, the marble floor, the humming elevator, the one flickering sconce, the three a.m. sandwiches. He sat on the bed with the left sock in his hand, and the right sock, and the back of his thighs ached from eight hours on a stool. Then he took off the uniform belt, the keys, the flashlight, and hung them on the closet hook the way he has for eleven years. The jeans came last, the belt looped through while he was thinking about nothing, and then the floor, and the prayer.

It wasn't a serious prayer. You can feel that in him: a habit, a few Hail Marys said fast, a thanks tossed at the ceiling, half an eye on the nightstand clock. He thought about the clock's red-green numbers. He thought about his son's tuition. He thought about the daughter who doesn't call enough. Under that, shyly, a girl from before Donna, a ponytail in a Dairy Queen lot, a name he doesn't say anymore. It is a small, harmless ache that he keeps like a stone in his coat.

The wedding band is tight on the knuckle. When you press your thumb against it, you get the day she slid it on, a church basement, too many casseroles, his own hands shaking. You also get the cigarettes he gave up, the taste of the last one, a decade gone, still a ghost on the back of his tongue.

Your knees ache, evenly, like a bill coming due. The back of your neck is damp. A bus goes past outside, or a truck, and somewhere downstairs a screen door says what screen doors say. Nobody knows you're here.

You lift your head. You turn his hands over in front of you, thick-fingered, hair on the knuckles, the ring catching the window light. They are warm. They are not yours.

You look up, into whatever is looking back, and say, in a voice that comes out low and a little hoarse, "Well. Amen."

The clock reads 12:58, and you wonder if you'll still be here when it changes.