Dale Wisniewski

You are standing in Ernesto Quintana's kitchen in the dark, and the refrigerator hums the way it has hummed every night you have been him, which is a little under a minute. The tile is cold through his socks. His knees ache a low, patient ache. His wife sleeps down the hall, and you have not gone to look at her, because looking would be a kind of staying.

Nothing is wrong with him. He is a good body, sound and tired, with a mind full of other people's code. But the glow of the laptop is on the counter, and the page is open, and the wheel sits there, turning slowly with nobody's name on it. You paid for the last one and it did not feel like anything. It felt like being handed a coat. You want the moment before the coat, the part where you don't know whose it is.

You press it. Ernesto's hands let go of the counter.

Then a sink is under your palm, cold porcelain, and your weight is thrown forward over it. The razor is against your jaw, stopped, and foam is drying tight on half your face. There is a window gone blue with early light. Your breath fogs a little in the mirror. The razor moves, up the jaw against the grain, and it goes past the corner of the mouth without stopping, quick and sure, and finishes the second half faster than the first.

You set the razor down. The tile is cold through black socks, and the shirt on your back is soft, worn nearly to nothing.

The shirt comes first. Gray cotton, washed a hundred times, and it gives you a morning in sleeves: his arms going in, the neck tight over his buzzed head, his wife's voice from the bed saying *take the good thermos*. Then the jeans, the belt notch he has moved out twice, and the small private sting of that. The sink gives you more. Your fingers drum on its rim, and they are his fingers, doing what they do when he is not thinking. They drummed on the wheel of every rig he has ever driven, on the table at his daughter's recital, on his knee in a clinic waiting room. He quit cigarettes eleven years ago, and the drumming is where the wanting went.

The ring on your left hand is cool and loose with soap. It hands you a porch, a June, a woman laughing with her shoes in her hand. The razor handle gives you his father, showing him how to pull the skin tight, saying *don't baby it*. There is a tattoo on the inside of your forearm, fine lines, a small geometry, and when your thumb crosses it a feeling comes up that has no picture, only tenderness, and a number: two. Two children. He did it the week after the second.

His back hurts in the way that fourteen hours of road hurts. His belly sits against the sink's edge, soft and familiar to him. His heart is steady, a little fast. Out past the window is a lot with a truck in it, waiting for him, and a town with one stoplight and a diner that closed.

You rinse your fingers under the tap and turn your hand over in the light. Freckles run down to the wrist, and you did not know they ran that far. The ring catches. You raise your eyes to the mirror, to the strange blue ones, the smooth jaw.

"Morning," you say, in a voice with gravel in it.

You don't know how long you get him. Nobody does.