Andrés Villagrán

Todd Warkentin's kitchen table has a coffee ring on it older than some marriages, and you have been sitting at it for forty-one seconds deciding whether you want to spend another Saturday being a Kansas cop with a bad knee and a mortgage that isn't yours to worry about but somehow worries you anyway. The badge on the counter caught the noon light wrong. You noticed you'd started caring whether the Royals won. That was the thing — not the knee, not the ex-wife who calls about the dog, but the small creeping fact that Todd's life had begun to feel like a life instead of a rented coat. Boredom is not the word. It was closer to alarm. You stood up before you finished deciding, got in his truck out of habit you didn't earn, and looked at his phone until you found the bookmark instead of driving anywhere at all.

The stirring stops mid-circle. Then it starts again, the other way, because your wrist doesn't know yet that it isn't his. The pan hisses. Salt goes in and nobody tastes it. Your hand — his hand, the one with the pale ring of paler skin around the base of the finger — reaches up into the cabinet without being told where the plates are, and brings down a second one, and sets it beside the first, quiet as a habit older than the hand that's doing it.

The flannel is warm against your back from the stove's heat, and that's the first thing that comes through — not a memory exactly, just the specific fact of this shirt, washed too many times, softened at the elbows, and then underneath that: a Tuesday three years ago, buttoning it in a bedroom with boxes still taped shut along one wall, his new apartment, his first apartment alone in eleven years, and the sleeve catching on his watch and Marisol's voice already fading out of the rooms he was in, though she was two thousand miles south and had been for months by then. The spoon in your hand remembers more: her handwriting on a recipe card, this exact dish, chicken with achiote she used to make for the kids on Saturdays, and how after she left he started making it for himself because stopping felt like one more thing gone.

The apartment breathes around you in smells you didn't put there — bleach from the landlord's hallway, the tang of a gas stove older than the building's paint job. Your feet, his feet, know this linoleum without looking, the give of it, the cold seam by the fridge. Your knees ache faintly in that mid-thirties, sat-at-a-desk way, the specific ache of a man who spends nine hours in fluorescent light reconciling other people's numbers and one hour standing here, at night if the shift ran late, at eight in the morning if he never really slept — and the sleep apnea machine's hiss lives somewhere in the back of your ears now too, a memory of a memory, of waking with his mouth dry at four a.m. in a bed too big for one.

The wedding band isn't there. Your finger keeps checking for it anyway, an old tell his hand still runs without asking permission — a habit from the year after the divorce, touching the tan line like a bruise to see if it still hurt. It did. It still does, a little, distant now, filed down. Two kids somewhere in Fairbanks with their mother's new husband's name half-adopted into their mouths, a phone call scheduled for Sunday that he thinks about more than he'll admit even to himself, standing here at his stove with a second plate out for no one, because grief has bad habits and one of his is setting the table for a family that doesn't eat here anymore.

You feel the whole small unremarkable weight of him settle into you — skinny fat, soft through the middle, forearms wiry from nothing in particular, glasses pushing a groove into the sides of his nose, high pale forehead cool under the kitchen light. Nothing about him snags. That, too, is a kind of truth: a man built entirely of ordinary parts, thirty years old and tired in the unglamorous way, standing in Anchorage at a stove on a Saturday morning that his body still thinks is night from all the years of overnight closes at his old job, before the accounting degree, before any of this.

You look down at the hand holding the spoon. It turns the spoon over once, like checking it's real, then sets it down against the pan's lip.

You look up, past the lamp with its yellowed shade, into whatever is watching, and you say, "Guess I'm still cooking for two."