Colin Wharton

Rohan Kaleka's phone is still in Rohan Kaleka's hand when you decide, standing in a motel parking lot in London, Kentucky, with the sun sitting low and orange over a Marathon station across the road. You have been him less than a minute and you already know the whole shape of the evening ahead of him: three more calls to make before nine, a hotel room paid for by a company that will not reimburse the mileage, a body that runs on protein shakes and problems you didn't cause and don't want to solve. The beauty mark under his left eye catches the side mirror when you check it out of habit that isn't yours yet. Muscular, competent, built for exactly this life. That's the trouble. There's no give in him. Thirty-seven years old and every hour already has a name on it. You spun for something without a schedule. You open the site on his phone with his thumb, because his thumb is the only one you have, and you spin again before you can call it anything as serious as a decision.

The restaurant comes up around you mid-word. *I'm sorry, I just* — and then the rest of it arrives from somewhere that isn't memory yet, isn't anything, and comes out anyway, clean and a little too loud: *—think I wanted this to go differently than it's going.* The water glass is between two fingers and it turns a quarter turn on the tablecloth and stops. Across the table a woman you have never seen is looking at you with an expression already halfway to done with this. A bread basket sits untouched between two place settings, napkin still folded under the rolls. You are sitting. You have a body under you that is lighter than the one you left, less certain in the shoulders, and a fringe of hair falling forward that you didn't push there.

The glass is cool and wet under your fingers and that's the first thing that comes through — not a memory, just a want, the small clean want to drink from it, and behind that want a whole afternoon: filling water glasses at a folding table in a church basement, sixteen years old, an aunt's wake, learning that keeping your hands busy is how you get through a room full of people being sad at you. Then the shirt. Navy, cotton, sleeves rolled to the forearm, and it gives you a morning — this morning — buttoning it in a bathroom with a cracked mirror, deciding against the collared white one because the white one looked like he was trying, and trying felt like something Danielle would see through immediately even over a screen four years gone. He'd stood in front of that mirror running a hand back through the fringe, pushing it forward again the way it always fell anyway, telling himself this was a good idea, a woman from the dating app who taught third grade and liked the same bad action movies he did.

The tattoos on his forearm are just lines under your eyes until you flex the arm and then they open like doors — the compass rose was inked at twenty-three, a bar in Fishtown, a friend's steady hand and a promise that it meant *finding your way*, which felt profound at the time and now just feels like a thing that's there. The triangle nested in another triangle came later, after his daughter was born, though he never tells anyone that's what it's for. She's four. She has his fringe already, unfairly, and a laugh that undoes him completely, and he sees her Wednesdays and every other weekend, and the custody calendar lives in his phone as a color he chose because it was the least sad color available. Danielle — not this woman across the table, the other one, the one who still texts him about their daughter and nothing else now, who ended it eight months ago over something he still turns over some nights, a slow drift more than a single fight, the two of them just quietly stopping being people who reached for each other.

Under the table your feet know the weight of steel-toed boots, worn at the heel from the specific drag of a mop bucket wheel, and that brings the corridor: fluorescent lights ticking off bank by bank behind him as he goes, the particular Monday-evening quiet of a school with all the kids gone, a ring of keys warm from his pocket, the smell of the pink soap in the dispensers he refills. He likes it more than he'd admit at a dinner table — the emptiness, the completed rooms, the small competence of knowing exactly which door sticks. His hands, resting now on the water glass, know that job without asking: the angle to hold a mop, the give of a key in a lock turned ten thousand times. Thirty-two years old, a body that carries no particular complaint yet, average and unremarkable and entirely serviceable, five-eleven of him folded into a chair he chose because it was near the window.

He goes to Mass some Christmases and Easters and tells himself that counts. He drinks maybe four times a year, always slightly too much when he does, always regrets the middle glass and not the first. He has never smoked, tried it once behind the maintenance shed and hated it instantly. None of that is why he's here tonight, across from a woman whose name you don't have yet because he hadn't used it out loud before you arrived. He's here because his best friend set this up and because being alone on a Monday felt worse than being bad at this in public. The apology had been forming in him for four minutes before it left his mouth, something about being distracted, being bad company — and it left in your voice instead, landing louder than he'd meant it, carrying to the next table, the glass turning that quarter-turn like something in him deciding to stop apologizing.

You look down at his hand on the glass — the compass rose, the nested triangle, the scuffed knuckle from some cart or door hinge he's stopped noticing — and you turn it over slowly in the restaurant light, like it might not hold.

Then you lift your eyes to hers and say, "Sorry. Start over?"