Warren Delacroix

Patrick Huelsman's apartment ceiling has a water stain shaped like Florida, and you have spent an hour and thirty-two minutes staring at it from a bed that smells like someone else's fabric softener, in a body that sweats too easily and gets winded on the stairs. It is the middle of the night and the radiator ticks. You made him laugh once tonight, at nothing, just to feel his face do it, and it did nothing for you. Forty years old and doughy and kind, probably, in the life you interrupted — a teacher, someone told small children about fractions today — and none of it is yours to keep warm. You did not spin again out of hatred for him. You spun again because the ceiling is still there and it is Saturday and nobody in New York is awake to stop you, and because thirty-one minutes ago you already knew you would, the way you always know. You open the site on his phone with his thumb. The wheel does not care whose thumb.

The spoon is already turning the other way before you understand your hand is on it.

It stops mid-circle — his circle, clockwise, the last thing he decided — and then it goes counter to that, because you are the one holding it now, and the going-back-the-other-way is the only outward sign that anyone changed shift. Steam off the pot. A window somewhere behind you with the New Orleans wet-street shine coming through it orange under a streetlamp. You salt what's in the pan without tasting it, because you don't know what it is yet, and your body — his body, 5'8", the low center of a man not young, not old — reaches up into a cabinet on its own, on muscle memory that isn't yours, and takes down a second plate. You set it beside the first one on the counter before you even notice you've done it. Two plates now. You didn't decide that. His hand did, on the way out the door of him, or maybe it's just what fifty-three years of Fridays taught this arm to do near midnight, and old grooves don't know yet that the man is gone.

The shirt is what opens first — flannel, plaid, worn soft at the elbows from leaning on hive boxes — and it comes in through your back like heat off a stove: a closet with a bare bulb, a hand (his hand, going through it a second, third time before you're wearing it right) buttoning wrong on the first try because the light's bad and his eyes aren't what they were, cursing lightly, redoing it. Getting dressed this morning in a room with peeling paint, a Saints pennant nobody's looked at in a decade, and starting the day already tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. You feel — not remember, feel — the particular ache low in the right hip, an old fall off a ladder near the hives, fifteen years gone and never right since, a thing his body works around now without asking permission, weight always favoring the left leg half a degree. Your — his — nose throbs faintly the way it does in cold weather, crooked under your fingers when you touch it, and you find you have already touched it, unbidden, the way his hand goes to his own face when his mind wanders, an old boxing-match-that-wasn't-a-boxing-match memory surfacing thin and quick: nineteen years old, a bar, a man twice his size, the crack of it, never set right because he was too broke and too proud to go back to the doctor a second time.

The smoker. Your palm remembers the handle of it before your mind does — worn wood, warm even when it's cold out, and with it comes an entire relationship: eleven years of hives out past the parish line, jars of gold lined up on a shelf he sells at the Saturday market for cash, the smell of him not cologne but propolis and smoke and sweat, a smell no woman he's dated in a decade has loved for long. Denise. Her name comes with the smell too — an ex he still thinks about on nights exactly like this one, gone eight years now and married to somebody dull in Baton Rouge, and still he sets two plates sometimes without catching himself, the way he's just done now, though the daughter, Colette, thirty-one and living in Lafayette with a baby he's seen four times, is who the second plate is really for in his head, some nights, a habit of hoping she'll call and say she's coming by. She won't tonight. He knew that when he started cooking. He's cooking for one and setting for one and the second plate is just a hand that hasn't caught up to a life that's already alone.

The bottle under the sink — you feel that too, the specific give of the cap, looser than it should be from how many times this month — and a whole vein of years opens with it: nights that started with one drink and ended with the lights off and the television on mute, a man who goes to Mass some Sundays hungover and prays through it anyway because it's the one hour nobody needs anything from him. Underneath the drink and the ache and the smoke-smell there's real money, oddly, quietly — land his father left him that a chemical company wanted badly enough to pay for, sitting mostly untouched in an account he doesn't think about, because none of it buys back the knee, or Denise, or Colette calling more than twice a year. He is, by every number that matters to other people, doing well. He does not feel like a man doing well. He feels like a man salting a pan he won't taste.

You look down at the spoon. At the hand around it — spotted faintly, a callus along the side of the index finger thick as leather, the crooked set of the nose visible even out of the corner of this borrowed eye when you catch the window's black glass throwing a reflection back at you. You set the spoon down. You lift both hands up in front of your face, turning them over slowly, palm to back, and something in the wrist twinges in a way you're already used to and never asked for.

"There you are," you say, to no one, in a voice thick with a city you've never had a throat for before tonight — and you don't know yet if that's true, or if it's just the first thing his mouth wanted to say once someone was finally in it to say it.