Curtis Voth

You are standing in Dale Hutchins's office chair in Houston, and the spreadsheet is still open, and your thumb has worn a bright place on the mouse. Fifty years old, and his knees ache when he crosses them. The cuff of his shirt smells of the sweet coffee creamer he buys. He is a good body. Nothing is wrong with him. That is what you cannot stand today: at noon someone down the hall laughed the way you had learned to laugh in him, the dimples folding in, and you caught yourself doing it back, and for one second you did not know which of you had done it. He had been yours for less than a minute and you were already becoming his habits. You open the page. The wheel turns. You do not decide anything. You pay.

Then you are standing.

The floor is under you, hard and shining, and a table's curved edge is against your thigh. Your right arm clamps a clipboard to your ribs. Your left hand has just let go of a chair back. Something has gone wrong half a second ago and you do not know what; the motion in your fingers is wrong, so you do it again slowly, right, and then ten more times, each one checked, though you don't know what you are checking. Light through the window has gone yellow. Wheat stubble runs flat to the horizon and over it a thunderhead is stacking black.

Your leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. The heel taps the floor, quick and tired, and you cannot make it stop.

The lanyard swings against your chest, and the keys on it touch your breastbone, cold, and a flash comes up that is not yours: a hallway in the dark, a small hand pulling the keys off his neck, a girl's laughter, his own heart going soft as bread. The feeling arrives before the picture does. Love, and under it a tightness, like a number he does not say aloud.

The polo is thin cotton, washed gray. Pressed against your back, the collar gives you the morning. His hands, not yours, working the buttons at the neck in the bathroom light, thumbs too big for them. The shirt is the one he wears Tuesdays because it hides the belly less than the black one but does not itch. His wife in the doorway behind him, hair wet, saying the bank had called again, and him saying he'd handle it, and both of them knowing there was nothing to handle. He had put on the khakis sitting on the bed edge, one leg then the other, the knee complaining. He buckled the brown belt to the third hole, the one it had left a groove in. A drink or two most evenings, and the glass in the cabinet over the sink where he does not have to see it in the morning. Lord, he'd said, brushing his teeth, not as a prayer, just the word, the way you say it in a Methodist pew when the offering plate goes by and you have nothing in it.

The clipboard's edge bites your ribs. Paper, the little checkmarks, names of children: Mateo, Brynn, a boy who bites. Kidney table, small chairs. He knows where each child sits without looking. For years his hands have known this. You feel how much he loved being needed by someone small, and how it never paid.

Your face is tight with freckles you cannot see. Your goatee itches under the chin. The ring on the left hand turns when you press your thumb to it, smooth, loose by a hair. A week of his marriage comes back in that one circle: a kitchen, a debt printed in red, her hand over his, steady.

Thunder, far off. The windows hum.

You lift your hand and look at it. Square, freckled, a callus from pencils. You turn it over. The palm is damp. You lift your eyes to the glass, to your reflection against the storm, and say quietly, "Okay, Curtis. Let's see how long."

Somewhere under the thunder, the wanting is already asking.