Walter Kwan

Here is Gary Lindholm's thumb on the trackpad, and the thumb is thick and sure, and you are sick of it. That is the whole of the reason, or the part you would say aloud. Gary has a route and a cooler of bad coffee and a knee that clicks on the stairs. An hour ago, in the dark of his kitchen in Miami, with everyone asleep behind the walls, you stood at the sink and found you could not remember what you had wanted from him. You wanted his van keys for a day. You have had them for a day. The other thing, the thing you would not say out loud, is that his wife's voice came through the wall saying his name in her sleep, and it was not meant for you, and you have been carrying it like a stone in a shoe. So you pay. You spin. The wheel clicks down through its names and slows on a stranger.

Then there is no kitchen.

There is a mattress under your chest, and your face is pressed into a pillow gone warm and damp, and one arm hangs off the edge into cooler air. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains, orange, sodium, wet. Your breath is ragged and then, in one pull, it is even. The arm draws itself up. You roll onto your back and your hands fold at the sternum, a way of lying he has never once slept in, and the ceiling is a stranger's ceiling with a crack in it.

Nothing is yours yet. Then the cotton of the T-shirt, worn thin, rides against your ribs, and he comes up through it.

The shirt is the one he wears to bed because his wife bought three of them at a sale, and he took the navy. He is sixty-five and his shoulders ache in the particular way of a man who has lifted cartons since he was twenty-two. He gets up at four-thirty for the dock in Sunset Park, he pulls the vest off a hook, the hoodie, the cargo pants with the pocket that holds his gloves. Dressing is in the shirt's memory: left arm first, always, because the right shoulder complains. The zipper of the hoodie, the vest's Velcro, the boots he laces with a double knot because a loose one once nearly cost him a toe.

The sheet under your fingers gives you the stoop. Rain on the brownstone steps, his wife Maureen's hand, no, Linh's hand, on the rail, their two kids small and soaked and laughing, him carrying both up at once. It is a good one and it lasts, the weight of them against his neck, the smell of wet wool, a happiness so plain it embarrasses you.

Your thumb finds the ring on your left hand. It turns it, around and around, without being asked. Under the turning comes another woman, years back, a girl with a laugh in a diner in Flushing, before Linh, a letter he never answered, a thing nobody knows he kept. Then the rosary in the drawer beside the bed, and a cigar after Mass on Sundays, one only, on the stoop. The whiskey he stopped drinking after his brother's funeral, the exact morning, the exact cold glass he set down and never lifted again.

Your knees hurt. Your back is strong. The stubble on your jaw rasps against your knuckle.

You lift your hand into the orange light and look at it. Freckles run to the wrist, and the band is worn pale at one edge. You turn it over. The palm is callused where a pallet handle sits.

You look up. Somewhere in this house a floorboard ticks and a woman breathes.

"Hello, Walter," you say, quietly, in his gravel.

You do not know how long he is yours. Hours. Years. Until the wanting comes back, and it will, and you lie there with your thumb on the ring, waiting to feel it begin.