Alejandro Cepeda

You are David Kowalczyk for three more minutes, standing in his kitchen in New York with his phone still warm in your pocket, and you already know you are done with him. It's not the arms, thick as they are, or the green eyes you liked well enough in the mirror this morning. It's that he texted his sister back an hour ago about their mother's hip, and something about typing "call you tonight" in his voice, meaning it, sat in your chest like a stone you didn't order. Three minutes is not enough to build a life but it's enough to feel the shape of one closing around you, and you don't want a shape. You want the wheel. You open the site on his phone with his thumb, because it's the only thumb you have, and you spin.

The sink comes up first — porcelain edge under a left palm, cool and a little damp. Then the weight: shorter than David, heavier through the middle, a body that sits low and solid the way a loaded truck sits low. Foam on half a jaw. A razor already moving, already past the place where a man's hand usually stutters at the corner of the mouth, and it does not stutter, it just finishes, clean strokes up against the grain, because whatever muscle memory lives in this jaw has done this ten thousand mornings and does not know yet that someone else is asking it to.

The gray t-shirt against your back is the first thing that talks. It gives you a Tuesday — laundry day, Marisol folding it warm out of the dryer while the kids fought over the last waffle, and the small flare of nothing-feeling that comes from folding your own husband's shirts, the kind of nothing that is actually a whole marriage running quiet underneath it. The sweatpants at your ankles give you almost nothing, just cold floor tile and a habit of going barefoot in the house no matter the season, Marisol always after him to wear socks, his mother's voice in that too, somehow, all the way from a kitchen in Kensington thirty years gone.

The razor itself opens wider. Alejandro's hands know this ritual bone-deep: three days off the road, home in Philly, and the beard always comes off on day one because Marisol likes his face bare when he kisses the kids goodnight and because the DOT physical is Monday and he likes to look like a man who has his life squared away, even the parts that are hanging by a thread. You feel, distantly, the ghost of his fatigue — four hundred miles yesterday, a lower back that never fully unclenches, a right knee that clicks going down stairs. Strong across the shoulders in the way men get strong from strapping load after load rather than from any gym. A leg that wants to bounce and isn't, right now, because he's steadying himself against the sink.

The tattoo comes up when your own forearm brushes it reaching for the towel — Alejandro, 2012, her handwriting copied onto his skin the year they got married, before either kid, when they still lived in his mother's basement and called it temporary. And behind that: the ex who still sits somewhere unfinished, Yesenia, gone eight months now, the last real fight replaying itself in flashes that aren't yours to want and come anyway — her voice saying something true and cruel in a parking lot, him driving four hours after with nothing but the radio for company, telling himself it was over, mostly believing it. The wedding band is cold and plain when your thumb finds it out of old habit, and it brings Marisol whole: her weight against him in bed at 6 a.m. before either of them has to get up, the kids' names in his mouth a hundred times a day, Destiny's laugh, Marcus asking when Dad's home. A meeting hall on Wednesdays he doesn't love going to but goes to anyway, a small orange bottle on the shelf behind the mirror that he doesn't tell his brothers about. Church on the Sundays he's not driving. Never once craving a drink, never once wanting a cigarette, not even out here at 2 in the afternoon Philadelphia time with a body still humming off a long haul and every reason a man could want one.

You feel all of it land in a body that is shorter than the last one, denser, tired in a way that isn't unhappiness, just miles. It is a good life being remembered into you, sleeve by sleeve, and for a second that's almost a reason to stay in it.

You look down. The razor's still in your hand, foam gone from one side of the jaw, the other cheek smooth already, symmetrical now, done. You turn the hand over — thick fingers, a callus map you didn't earn, the ring catching the bathroom light.

"Almost forgot Monday," you say, to no one, in his voice, and you don't know yet if that's true for a week or for the rest of a life you haven't decided to keep.