Cody Rawlins

You are Frank Meighan for less than a minute, and already you know you are done with him. It isn't his fault. His knees are fine and his stubble is gray, and the dimples pull when you try your mouth. The trouble is the quiet in him. You stood at his kitchen window in the Tuesday noon light, a fork in his hand, and found that his life ran on nothing you wanted. You have been wearing men for a long time. You know the feeling when a body has nothing left to teach you, and it arrives early with this one. You would not say it aloud. You set the fork down and open the page. The wheel turns under his thin, fast fingers.

The stirring stops mid-circle.

You are standing. Heat comes up off a pot against your chest, and a wooden spoon is in your right hand, already moving. It goes the wrong way, so you reverse it. The pan ticks. Your back is to a room you haven't seen. The light is white and hard at a window on your right, and it is morning, not noon. Your leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to, and it does not stop.

You salt the pan from a box you didn't look for. You don't taste it. A second plate is already in your left hand, and you set it down beside the first.

The counter edge presses a line across your thighs. Under that, the shirt: gray, thin at the collar, soft as skin from a thousand washes. It brings up a morning. His hands, not yours, are pulling it over his head in a dark room, and there is a wince at his lower back. Then the jeans, stiff at the knee, the belt on its worn notch. He sits on a bed's edge and works his boots on. The left one always fights him. He thinks, *Lord, get me to Amarillo with my head on straight.* The prayer is plain and habitual, and it is his, and it goes through you like a draft.

The spoon is smooth and worn at the handle, and your grip shifts into a place it knows. A different kitchen opens up, a woman's hand over his, teaching him to stir a roux without hurrying. She is long gone, and the loss isn't in the memory. It is in how careful his hands are now.

A vape sits by the stove. Your thumb finds it before you do, and a craving rolls through you, sweet and chemical. Under that is a harder thing: a church basement, folding chairs, a coffee that tastes like a penny. He gave up the bottle there. He is proud of it and tells nobody.

A drawer is open. Paper pokes out of it. Your eye catches a number, and the number is a weight in his chest like a hand pushing down. It is more than a truck is worth, and more than the house. He lies awake with it. His belly sags over the belt, his shoulders ache from the wheel, and the heel of the left hand is callused from ten years of shifting. You feel all of it, and none of it is yours.

The second plate sits there, white and empty. You can't tell why you set it down. It was his hand that reached, not yours. Some habit lives in the cabinet's reach, in the kitchen's own geometry.

The pan hisses. The leg bounces.

You lift your hands and look at them. They are broad, thick-knuckled and chapped, with dark grease in the creases. You turn them over. They feel borrowed and, for the moment, fine.

You look up and say, to nobody, "All right. Let's see how long you last." The words are for him, but they are mostly for the wheel.