I kept the hoodie

I own four forks and three of them came with the house. I'm not a guy who keeps things. When I moved off Powell I left a cast iron pan sitting on the counter because I didn't want to carry it down two flights, and I've thought about that pan exactly never.

There's a grey hoodie in my closet with Deke's Auto Body on the back in red thread. The cuffs are shot and there's a spot on the front pocket where something took the color out, bleach or brake cleaner, I never asked. It's been in two moves. Both times I put it in the box myself.

I'm in my second year of a program that pays me just enough to be in a house off 60th with four other people. Tuesdays and Thursdays I stand in Johnson Creek in waders and drag a net through it. It's mostly bugs. My room's four hundred a month and the closet is half a closet, because the water heater's in the other half.

Ted's in my cohort. We started the same September and he's the reason I know anybody in this city. Cody is his brother, four years up. He does bodywork out in Gresham and drives a truck.

We were whatever we were from the end of one summer to just after Thanksgiving. Mostly his place on weeknights, because his place was his and mine has four other people and one bathroom. He slept on his back with one arm over his face and took up the middle of the bed. He did come over once when everyone was at a show, and after, he sat on the edge of my bed and put his socks on one at a time like he was getting ready for work.

The hoodie happened in October outside the Plaid Pantry on Halsey. I had a t-shirt on and it was doing the thing where it's fifty-five degrees until suddenly it isn't, and he pulled it over his head and handed it to me without a word about it.

It ended in the parking lot behind the bar on Sandy, after Ted's birthday. Somebody from the shop had said something inside and Cody laughed, which was fine, I laughed too. Out by the cars I asked him if he was ever going to say anything to Ted. He said no. I asked him when, then, and he said I was making it a thing.

Then he got in the truck and backed out and I walked up to the MAX.

Ninety seconds, if that. What I remember is the dumpster and the fact that the light at the far end of the platform was out, so everybody was bunched up at the near end.

I sent one text in January about a fender he'd been hunting for a Tacoma. He liked it. That's the last thing that's happened between us.

For a while I didn't wash it. That stopped working around February. Now it smells like my closet, and my closet smells like a water heater.

First move was that same February, out of Powell into a place on Holgate with a mouse. Second was June. Both times I did the closet last and both times it went into a box marked KITCHEN, because the kitchen box had room in it.

At Holgate there was no rod in that closet, just a nail somebody had put in the door frame, so it hung off the nail for four months with nothing next to it. The mouse got into the oats and never went in there.

In April I drove out there to give it back. Put it in a Winco bag on the passenger seat, took 84 with the wipers on the setting that's too fast for the rain, since the other setting's too slow. The truck was in the driveway. The neighbor still had Christmas lights up on the gutter. I sat with the engine running about as long as you'd sit at a light, and then I drove to the Chevron on 181st and put eleven dollars into a car with half a tank, and came home. The bag rode back up front.

In May I got as far as putting it in a sack for the Goodwill on 39th, along with a jacket that never fit and a rice cooker that only worked if you held the button down. The sack went in the trunk. The jacket and the rice cooker made it inside the store.

Two weeks ago Wes pulled the hoodie out of the clean pile in the basement and put it on. Wes is the one who runs the dryer at one in the morning, which is its own conversation. He'd taken the recycling down and it was cold and there was a hoodie there. He wore it to his shift at the bottle shop on Killingsworth and then he wore it the next day.

I came into the kitchen and there it was with somebody else's shoulders in it, Deke's across the back the way it always is, and he was eating cereal out of a mixing bowl because we were out of bowls.

I asked for it back in the hallway. Not loud. Flat, like asking for a charger. He stopped with one arm still in the sleeve and said okay, man, it was in the clean pile.

I told him it was my brother's.

I don't have a brother. It came out with no gap in front of it. He said okay again and handed it over and went and got a beer out of the fridge, and I stood in the hall holding it with both hands.

So it's back on the hanger. The wire one. Everything else in there is plastic and I don't know where the wire one came from.

Ted texts me Thursdays about Sunday. His girlfriend makes a pan of something, there's always more than four people can eat, and I turn up with a twelve of Rainier I can't really afford. Cody's there maybe one time in five. We say hey. Last month he asked how the creek was and I said wet, and he said yeah, and that was all of it, and I had two plates and took a container home.