Craig Buttermore

You are standing at the treatment plant's chlorine racks, alarm panel blinking amber in the corner of your eye, when the migraine hits — Owen's migraine, a real one, the first he's had since you took him, and it splits down the left side of his skull like something is trying to get out through the eye socket. You know these; a beauty mark under his jaw, heterochromia catching the fluorescents wrong, a body that gets these headaches maybe twice a month, and you have had thirty-some evenings in him now, enough to know the particular ache of standing in a job you did not choose, watching a chlorine reading, waiting for a shift that never really ends. It is not the pain. You have had worse pain in other men. It's that Owen was never really yours to begin with — he came to you already tired, already flat, a water operator's water operator, and the wanting that sent you here the first four hundred and some times has gone quiet in him, the way it does. You feel it stir again standing at the rack, that specific itch, and you go to the little office off the pump room where the terminal is, and you pull up vessel.cards on a phone with a cracked corner, and you spin.

Your knees hit bedspread. Not the floor of the pump station — bedspread, a comforter with some kind of gold thread in it, and your hands are laced together loosely in front of you, and there's a clock on the nightstand reading a time that means nothing yet, and a lamp throwing warm light against a wall you have never seen. You were rising — this body was rising, mid-motion, some upward intention already begun in the thighs and the knees — and now it folds back down instead, knees finding the carpet again on their own, and a breath that started as a laugh stops being a laugh halfway out. Forehead comes down against the bedspread. You are heavier than Owen, wider through the middle, and there is a wedding band pressing cool against your laced fingers, and everywhere skin touches skin there's a strange give, patched, uneven, like ground that thaws differently in different places.

The t-shirt is against your back first, and it comes in a rush that isn't yours: standing in front of a mirror this morning — no, not morning, six-something, the sun already low and orange through the bathroom window because this is El Paso and the light comes in sideways at the end of the day — pulling this exact shirt over his head, catching, as always, on the part of his ear where he never quite remembers to duck, a small domestic irritation repeated maybe four thousand times in a marriage. Sherry's voice from the other room, something about the "Ramirez file," which means nothing to you and everything to him, a whole account he has been managing badly, gently, for eleven months, a client account he inherited from a guy who quit and never should have kept, and something in Craig's chest — because it's Craig, the name arrives with the second flash, stitched to a lanyard he touched an hour ago, CRAIG BUTTERMORE, plant photo taken on a bad day — something in his chest tightens at the thought of Monday, glass walls, the door he leaves open because closed doors make people talk, forty-one direct reports and none of them his idea, a promotion he took because it paid for the house.

The knees against the carpet bring the house up whole: turquoise stucco under merciless white light, chain-link sagging at one corner where the dog used to push through before the dog died, four years of a shared mortgage with Sherry, who he loves with the specific tiredness of someone who has stopped being afraid of losing her and started being afraid of disappointing her instead. No kids — a decision made early, mutually, that he still sometimes turns over on nights like this one, kneeling, not really praying, more like checking in with something the way you'd check a mirror. The wedding band against his laced fingers gives him the wedding itself, briefly — her sister crying too hard, a heat that made the flowers wilt by six PM — and then lets it go.

His hands know things yours don't: how to hold a highlighter over a spreadsheet without pressing hard enough to bleed through, how to shake forty-one hands and remember which ones sweat, how to rub two fingers against his left temple exactly here, exactly this pressure, when the migraine starts building behind the eye — and it is building now, distantly, a familiar weather system he recognizes before it arrives. He drinks two fingers of something most nights around now, not tonight yet, not for another hour that will never come for him. His faith is real in the shape of it and thin in the follow-through — Sunday services, a bumper sticker he half-regrets, and a prayer at the edge of a bed that he starts most nights and rarely finishes meaning, tonight included, tonight especially, tonight he got almost all the way to amen laughing a little at himself for even bothering.

You feel the vitiligo skin under your own palms as you lift your face off the bedspread — smoother in some places, rougher in the seam between patches, his and now yours, all the way up one side of his jaw, and you did not do that and cannot undo it and were never asked to weigh it either way.

You look at your hands, laced together, married, mapped in two colors of the same skin, and you turn the left one over to catch the lamp on the ring.

"Sherry," you say, to no one in the room, testing the shape of a name that isn't yours yet, "I'm coming down in a minute" — and you don't know if that's true, or for how many minutes it will be true, or whose mouth will still be saying it tomorrow.