Brian Kowalik

Wade Fontenot's kitchen smells like burnt coffee and the inside of a cab he hasn't driven in thirty-six hours, and that smell is the whole problem. It is a Monday, the middle of the morning, and Wade should be somewhere past Baton Rouge with a load of frozen shrimp, but instead you have him standing at his own counter in his own boxers, gray hair not combed, looking at a phone that isn't ringing with dispatch and won't. Thirty-one bodies now and the thing you keep learning fresh each time is that a body is a set of problems that came pre-installed, and this one's problem is a knee that locks on the clutch and a dispatcher who's already called twice. You didn't take this man to become a truck driver. You took him because the wheel gave him to you, and you stayed in him a day and twelve hours mostly out of a kind of exhausted curiosity — what's it like, gray at thirty-seven, a back that talks to you on every downshift — and now that curiosity's answer has arrived and the answer is: it hurts and it's boring and there's a woman named Denise who keeps texting a man who isn't you asking where the hell he's been. You did not sign up for Denise. You open the site on Wade's cracked phone, thumb sure over the glass the way it's been sure thirty times before, and you spin without even the decency of a held breath.

The room that comes up around you is dark and it is not the same dark. Where Wade's kitchen had a window going gray-blue with morning, this room is sealed, blackout curtain, a headboard you can feel against your shoulders before you've located a shoulder to feel it with. Weight arrives all at once and it is a different weight — heavier through the middle, shorter, a phone already lit and already in a hand that was not, one half-second ago, yours. The thumb is mid-flick on a scroll he'd stalled on, and you don't stop it, you speed it, faster than he was going, cleaner, past a photo of a dog and a headline about interest rates, the screen's blue throwing itself up one side of a face that has quietly stopped blinking on schedule.

The phone is the first thing that opens. It is warm from a hand that held it a long time, and through it comes a flash of a bar the night before last, a rooftop one, string lights, a woman's laugh that isn't his wife's — and behind that a longer thing, an ex-girlfriend named Paige who he ended it with in March and still, God help him, has saved under a name that isn't her name, in case anyone's looking. That's not why he loves who he loves. It's just a thing he never deleted. The band on the left hand is next — plain, a little tight this year — and it brings back a wedding on a Scottsdale golf course, heat coming up off the cart paths in visible sheets, his wife's dress sticking to her calf, both of them laughing about the caterer being late because there wasn't anything else to do but laugh. That memory is warm and it is real and it sits strangely next to Paige, the way two true things can share a chest without agreeing to.

The mattress under a heavy build tells him — tells you, wearing him — that this is his side, the left, always the left, ten years of always the left. The T-shirt against his back, damp a little with a night's sleep, remembers itself going on Sunday morning, over a head that ducked automatically, a stomach it doesn't quite clear anymore the way it used to, and he thought about that for exactly as long as it takes to stop thinking about it, which is how a heavy man makes peace with a mirror at thirty-four. The body underneath all of it is thick through the shoulders and gut both, comfortable in its own gravity, a lower back that will complain later about the porch steps of some listing in Maryvale, hands that know a lockbox combination without being told, a thumb that has learned, without anyone teaching it, exactly how far six inches from a face needs to be for the light not to hurt.

Somewhere under the bed frame is a memory of the site he'd normally be at by now — a duplex on the west side, brochure already printed, DUAL ESTATE across the top in blue — and the small ordinary dread of an open house that will draw four people and a nosy neighbor. There's a cigar box on the dresser he can't see but can feel the pull of anyway, an anniversary gift from his wife that he only opens on Sundays, and a rosary his mother pressed on him at his own wedding that he keeps in the nightstand and doesn't use enough and feels guilty about exactly on schedule, every Ash Wednesday. None of it is dramatic. It's just a life, assembled out of small furniture.

You look at the hand still holding the phone — thicker fingers than Wade's, a band cutting a little groove into the third one — and you turn it over once in the dark like you're checking it's real, the way you always do, thirty-one times now and it never stops being the strangest sentence a body can say to itself. Then you lift your eyes off it, up into the black mirror of the phone's dead screen, which is the closest thing in the room to a lens, and you say, to no one, in a voice that isn't yours yet but will answer to your name if you keep it a while —

"Hell of a Monday."