Craig Dillenbeck

You are Walter Przybylski, 57, and your mouth is sour with the gap where the front tooth used to be, tongue going to it the way it always does, a tic you never asked for. It is the middle of a Sunday and you have been him less than a minute — the laborer's hands, gray stubble, the ache already settling into a lower back that is not yours by nature but is yours now, by lease. You stood up from nothing, from the first idle second of being him, and already you know you are not staying. There was no event. That is the thing you would never say out loud if anyone could hear you: it isn't that Walter is bad. It's that he is used. Fifty-seven and broke down and the tooth gone and nothing waiting on the other side of this Sunday but more of the same Sunday. You didn't come back to the wheel because of something that happened to you in him. You came back because nothing did, and nothing was going to, and the site is still open on a screen somewhere behind eyes that are about to not be yours. You put the fifty dollars down again. You spin.

The water is running before you is you — his wrist already moving, the razor already climbing his jaw against the grain, no pause at the corner of his mouth, half his face still shining with foam and half of it bare and raw-pink and new. Thirty years old. You feel it as an absence of pain, which is its own kind of information: no lower back complaining, no gap in the teeth to find with the tongue, a jaw that is smooth under the blade because it was smooth an hour ago too. The bathroom light is morning light, flat and a little gray through a window with the shade half down, and the tile is cold under bare feet in a way that tells you it's early even though somewhere behind you a Sunday is already most of the way to noon.

The razor is a small thing to hold and it opens big. A whole year comes up through the handle of it — mornings in this same mirror, this same light, the plaid shirt hung on the hook by the shower because he laid it out the night before, always the night before, because mornings are when the trucks start loading on the deck and there's no time to think about a shirt once the sun's up. Craig Dillenbeck. The name arrives with the foam smell, with the mentholated cream, with the toothpaste tube flattened just so by somebody's thumb — Jess's thumb, not his, he rolls it from the bottom and she just mashes the middle and it drives him up a wall he's never once mentioned to her. Four years in that apartment with the dry palms outside and the courtyard that goes orange in the evening. Four years with her. He has thought about the ring more than he has let on. He has not bought one, because of the number that sits on him like a tide he can't see the bottom of — a hundred and ten thousand dollars underwater on a town-house that was supposed to be a starter and became a sentence, bought at the wrong year for the wrong price, and he does the math on it sometimes at two in the morning the way other men count sheep.

The shirt isn't on him yet but you can feel it coming anyway, folded on the hamper lid behind you — the specific give of the collar from a hundred washes, the second button that's never sat quite flush since it got sewn back on by his own clumsy hand with doubled thread. His hands know things without him: how to seat a tape measure against a rebar mat without looking, how to flip a pencil stub out from behind an ear that's never pierced, how to read a grade stake at forty feet and call it before anyone asks. Calluses along the first two fingers of the right hand, not thick, just enough to say he still works with that hand and not only a tablet screen. No ache in him. Thirty is a country Walter only remembers as a rumor.

Church is in there too, mild and regular as a tide — a service he doesn't love and wouldn't skip, a congregation that knows him as the quiet one with the dimples, the ones that stay dug in at the corners of his mouth even when he isn't trying for anything, which is most of the time. He has never had a drink in his life and has never wanted one badly enough to wonder why. He cracks his knuckles without noticing — right hand first, always, a habit Jess has given up correcting — and even now, mid-stroke with the razor, there's a looseness in the fingers of his free hand wanting to do exactly that.

He finishes the second side faster than the first, the way he always does, some old impatience with himself that nobody taught him and he never unlearned. The foam goes in the sink in a thin gray curl of water.

You look down at the razor still in your hand, turn it over like it might answer something, and your eyes go up into the mirror instead of past it.

"Didn't feel a thing," you say, to no one, in a voice that has dimples built into it even at rest — and somewhere underneath that sentence is Walter's gap-toothed Sunday, already a stranger, already something you are not going back to today. Maybe not tomorrow either. You don't know yet. Nobody does.