Walter Pelletier

You are Andre Kimbrough for less than a minute, and already you know what's wrong with him. The gap in his front teeth is too much tongue. The bald scalp is cold in the air of a Boston bedroom where everyone sleeps, and you stand at a dark window holding a phone that is lit with the wheel. He is a good body. He is landscaper-strong and he's sorry about nothing. But in the one minute you had him, you reached for a branch of the maple in the yard to prove something to yourself. You wanted to feel the leaves in a hand that was a stranger's, and nothing came. Not a flash, not a shiver. His hands were only hands. The wheel gives you a man and the man hands you nothing unless he owns it, and he owned nothing here that you touched. So you press the glass. The wheel turns.

It is a bedroom lit by one lamp. Your knees are on a rug, a thin one, and the floor is hard under it. You were laughing, you are still laughing, a breath of it caught in the chest, and you were halfway to standing when you came down. The bedspread is against your forehead. It smells of cedar and of somebody's hair. The clock on the nightstand reads 3:14, red. You have been given a man who prays at three in the morning, not very seriously.

Your hands are together. The left one has a ring, plain, and the thumb is already turning it, a habit older than you.

The shirt first. It is black, soft, washed gray at the chest, and it holds him against your back: his wife bought three of these at a store in Ellsworth, and he complained about the price and wore them anyway. He put this one on tonight in the dark so as not to wake her. He pulled it over the head, one arm, then the other, the sleeve catching his shoulder where the muscle is thick from the bike. His shoulder aches. It aches in a way he has stopped noticing, from years of leaning into the wind off the water with a bag of someone else's dinner on his back.

The ring. You turn it, and the flash is a church basement, folding chairs, coffee that tasted like the urn. He is twenty-six and she is laughing at him because he cannot tie the knot of his own tie. Her fingers do it. Then the warm feeling goes straight through you, that this is it, this is the one, and it is his feeling and not yours, and you almost say her name. You don't have it. It doesn't come.

The rug under your knees. A winter. Their daughter on this rug, small, building a house out of couch cushions, and his hands, your hands, holding the ceiling of it up while she crawled in. Her small voice: *Dad, you're the roof.* The ache of it in the throat.

Your fingers go to your face. They do it without being asked: the chin, the beard, a stroke down from the mole high on the cheek. You feel the mole with a thumb. Cigarettes come with the gesture, a ghost of them, eleven years quit, the hand still thinking it is going to light something. The wanting for it is gone, but the hand remembers the walk to the porch.

The nightstand. Keys, a glass of water, a paperback with a cracked spine. His knuckles brush the keys and you get the truck he doesn't have anymore, sold in March, and the number he did the math on at the kitchen table. Less than five thousand dollars to his name, all of it counted twice. Under the money there is the other thing, the one nobody knows. He prays because he is afraid, and he laughs through it so that God will not hear.

He's nobody. That is what you wanted: nothing, a quiet man in a house with silver shingles and traps stacked in the dooryard. The sea is out there in the dark. You can hear it through the glass.

You lift your hands off the bedspread. You look at the right one, then turn it over, the palm callused where the handlebar sits, and you look up.

"Okay," you say. It comes out of him low and easy, Maine in the vowels. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Your thumb finds the ring again and turns it. Somewhere, a clock you can't hear is running.