Corey Blankenship

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Philip Castagno's hands are old man's hands, and they are shaking a little on the diner-yellow light of the phone screen, two minutes into a body that smells like engine grease and Folgers no matter how hard he scrubs. You are only just getting used to the ache in the knees, the way standing up from a chair takes a full second of negotiation now, when you remember why you came back tonight instead of staying in him for a week like you meant to.

It's not boredom with Philip exactly. It's that somewhere in his gray foreman's head, a thought keeps surfacing that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with a day and a half ago, when you were still wearing Darius Whitehorse — his short, compact, furious little body, his El Paso house with the one photo on the mantel he never explained — and you spent thirty-one hours as a man who hated, actively, daily, with real architecture to it, somebody named Corey. A coworker. A rival. You never even met the man in the flesh. You only inherited the grudge, fully built, sitting in Darius's jaw every time his name came up in a text thread, in an old voicemail Darius never deleted, in the particular tightness of his shoulders walking past a certain cubicle.

You want to know what it's like from the other side. That's all it is. Plain and a little shameful, the kind of want you wouldn't say out loud to anyone wearing a face.

So before the sun's really up over the gray Sunday fog, standing in Philip's cramped kitchenette with his coffee going cold, you open the site on his phone with his old-man thumbs, and you spin.

—

The weight arrives before anything else does — taller, heavier through the shoulders than Philip was, younger by half a lifetime. A soft mattress underneath. Gray sweatpants against your shins. A phone in your hand, unlocked already, a stranger's face as the lock screen's ghost under a wallpaper of a woman and a boy, and your thumb is moving down through someone else's messages like it already knows the rhythm of it, like it's done this every Sunday morning for years.

It has. That's the thing that comes next, before you've even finished arriving: his thumb knows this motion because it is not his phone, and the knowing-it-isn't is already an old, tired itch by the time you land in it.

The shirt is what opens first. Thin cotton, soft from a hundred washes, going loose at the collar, and through it comes the memory of pulling it over his head this morning in the gray dark before anyone else was up, the particular give of the fabric at the shoulder seam where it's thinned, Marisol still asleep with one arm thrown over the space where he'd been. Putting on these sweatpants sitting on the edge of the bed so the elastic wouldn't snap too loud and wake her. The quiet triumph of a Sunday with no alarm he has to answer to but the kid's stomach.

Then the beard comes alive under your own chin, the weight of it, the two inches of it that took years to get right, that he is faintly, privately proud of though he'd never say so, the way his fingers go to stroke it without thinking the way another man's hand finds his pockets. The eyebrow barbell is a small cool fact at the edge of an eyebrow, put in at twenty-two for a reason he doesn't fully remember and kept ever since out of simple stubbornness. The wedding band on the left hand is warm already from his own skin, and with it comes four years of a wedding, a reception in his in-laws' backyard, Marisol's laugh carrying over folding chairs, a vow he meant and still means on mornings like this one when the house smells like syrup and nobody needs anything from him yet.

And then — because the phone is still in the hand, because the phone is the thing that is actually happening — it comes all at once, ugly and familiar as an old bruise: this isn't his phone. He found it in a drawer at his in-laws' place, an old handset somebody left behind, thought it'd be funny to see what still worked on it, downloaded some stupid face-swap app a buddy sent him at 2 a.m., and now it's sitting there lit up with somebody else's whole life — notifications stacked ten deep, a name that isn't his, a face that isn't his either when he holds the camera up as a joke. He doesn't know whose. He never will. He was never going to be told. His thumb goes down through it anyway, because it's Sunday, because the baby — because the boy, four now, not a baby, you correct yourself inside a feeling that isn't yours — is downstairs with Marisol and the cereal bowls, because there's a laundry basket of small socks waiting and a Spider-Man backpack by the door for the half-day of camp that starts tomorrow, because this, all of this, the whole soft unremarkable machine of it, is his.

Somewhere in there, small and separate, is Corey Blankenship — a name in an old message thread this man never answered, a face from a job he left three years ago in another city, a rivalry that outlived the job and the city both and followed him here the way those things do, folded up small enough to fit inside a Sunday morning and mostly forgotten. You go looking for the hate Darius carried for this man and you don't find a mirror of it. You find nothing where you expected a wall. Just a stranger's name in a phone that isn't even his.

The gum isn't in his mouth right now, and his jaw misses it anyway, works at nothing for a second out of forty years of habit.

You turn the phone over in his hand, then look at the hand itself — broader than Philip's, younger, a thin white ring-line where the band usually sits except it's still on, catching the window light.

"Who even *is* this guy," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in his voice, and you don't mean the stranger in the phone.

Downstairs, something clatters, a kid laughs, and the whole rest of the morning is sitting there waiting, and you have no idea yet how long you get to keep it.