Brian Novotny

You are standing in Reginald's kitchen at three in the morning, and the ice maker just dropped a load into the bin, too loud, and that's the whole reason you're awake to notice you don't want to be him tonight.

Fifty-five years in a body that did the job right — a retired man's body, silver-haired, a scar through the eyebrow from something you never bothered to learn the story of, because it wasn't yours to learn, it was just the last one — and it has been less than a minute since you decided that on top of everything else, it is boring. Not bad. Boring. Four minutes deciding it, then walking to the counter where the laptop already sits open on vessel.cards because it is always open, because five hundred and thirty-six times has a way of leaving a tab up. You are barefoot on his kitchen tile. You spin because there is nothing on television and no one to explain yourself to and you are the only person awake in a city full of people who think they know who lives in this apartment.

The wheel turns and lands and there is no in-between.

You are sitting. There is a glass of water under your hand, sweated cool, and you are turning it a quarter turn on a wooden table without having decided to. A bread basket, untouched, close enough to smell the yeast. Across from you, a face arranging itself out of disappointment into something more careful, waiting on the end of a sentence you apparently already started. Your mouth finishes it — "—so anyway, that's why I don't really do golf" — and it lands wrong, too loud, carrying two tables over, and you feel the new weight of a gut you didn't have a second ago, the collar of a gray polo snug at a thicker neck, the tackiness of a comb-over losing its hold at the temple.

The glass is what opens first. Water glasses, a hundred of them, in a hundred diners between here and Tulsa, his hand always finding the same grip low on the base, thumb hooked forward — a trucker's grip, built for a cab bouncing at seventy, applied uselessly to a still table in a dead-quiet restaurant in a town with one stoplight. You feel it settle in you: nine years of a Peterbilt seat molded exactly to this spine, exactly to this lower back that never stopped complaining after year twelve. Cargo runs east out of Columbus, weigh stations at four a.m., a thermos that's been the same thermos since Obama's second term.

The polo shirt gives you the morning it went on — hours ago in his memory, though tonight the ordinary math of that has gone crooked, because where he is it is also deep night, and a man does not usually dress for a first date at an hour like this. But he did: shift work does that, trades your clock for freight schedules until Saturday means whatever it needs to mean, and he'd pulled a late load into the yard, showered fast in the truck stop bathroom, and put this on for a stranger from an app at an hour that only made sense to him. Sleeve by sleeve it comes back — checking the collar wasn't ringed with the yellow a wash cycle never quite gets out, deciding not to shave the second time, telling himself in the mirror over the sink that this one might not go the way the others went. The rolled cuffs were his own doing, twice, for the forearms, because someone once told him — he doesn't remember who, doesn't want to — that he had good forearms.

His left hand rests on the table too, and the ring finger tells you before any memory does: a pale stripe where metal used to sit, years of tan built up around an absence. It comes with a name he still turns over some nights — a husband, once, who left first with the leaving and second with the good jokes, who has the kids Tuesdays and every other weekend, who Brian still texts about school forms in a voice gone flat and civil the way only real love manages once it's finished being love. Two kids. A boy's laugh through a phone speaker. A girl who draws horses that don't look like horses yet and doesn't care.

Under the shirt: forty-four years carried in a frame gone soft at the middle the way men's do when the job is sitting more than moving; shoulders still wide from loading a truck himself half the time because the guys at the dock are slower than he is; a lower back that clicks getting out of the cab and has for a decade; hands rough enough at the pads that the water glass barely registers cold. There's a tattoo on his calf under the jeans — some regretted thing from a bar in Terre Haute, a shape he's never once shown off since — and it doesn't come up now, not touching anything, just a fact sitting quiet in the leg like a stone in a shoe. A pack of cigarettes waits in his jacket on the seatback, unlit for the last two hours out of some idea that a first date deserved that much restraint.

Across the table, the other man's face is still waiting on whatever comes after the golf line, and you feel Brian's whole recent history of dates gone like this — small towns run thin on men who want what he wants, thinner on men who want it and also don't flinch at the two kids and the CB radio drawl — and under that a tiredness that isn't about tonight at all, that's about a marriage that ended reasonably and still somehow took the wind out of every year since.

You look down at your hand on the glass. Thick fingers, a nail bed with a old bruise going yellow-green at one corner, the pale absent stripe where the ring was. You turn the hand over slow, like checking it's real, the way you always do, the way five hundred and thirty-six men before him have had their hands turned over by you without ever knowing it.

You look up, past the man across the table, into the middle distance where the next booth's TV is playing highlights nobody's watching, and you say, in Brian Novotny's voice, carrying exactly as far as it did a second ago —

"Sorry — where was I."