Finish

We carried the table down three flights—

me at the bottom, my friend at the top,

angling it around the second-floor railing.

It had been her grandmother's.

March, the grandmother.

June, the move.

On the landing I tilted it

to clear the rail

and saw my face in the surface—

compressed, yellow-toned,

the stairwell ceiling behind me,

my friend's shoes above.

I held the angle longer than I needed to.

The face in the lacquer

didn't look like me

looking at a table.

It looked like someone

who'd wandered into the wrong photograph.

*You got it?* she said.

Yeah, I said, and we kept going.

We loaded it into the truck.

Her grandmother bought it in the sixties,

my friend said. Or her parents.

She wasn't sure.

The surface was perfect.

Not a scratch on it.

Sixty years.

I kept thinking about that

on the drive back.

What a person has to not do,

for sixty years,

to keep something like that.