Dale Wozniak

Connor's knees have started to feel like a thing I'm borrowing too hard. Five hours and forty-five minutes in him, and the dishwasher's whole body is a hum of wanting: the steam still in his forearms, the beauty mark I keep finding in the dark window glass, the short beard I stroke when I'm thinking. He was fine. He was young and quick and nothing hurt. That's what I can't forgive. Tonight a girl at the end of the bar said his name, the one I'd read off his own phone, and I answered to it like a dog, and she laughed and said, "You're not even in there tonight, are you?" She was right. I went to the bathroom, looked at the brown eyes, and opened the page with the wheel on it. It was not boredom. It was that someone had looked at him and nearly seen me.

The wheel turns. Connor ends mid-sentence, somewhere behind me, and I am standing in an aisle.

The rhythm breaks. My right hand reaches for a box and does it wrong, the scanner beeping a refusal against the label. I do it again, slowly, and the beep is green. Then ten more, each one checked, each one on a job my hands have clearly done ten thousand times.

Cold concrete comes up through the soles of boots that are too broken-in to feel like anything but him. A forklift beeps somewhere out of sight, backing, backing. The air smells of cardboard and old brick and a heater scorching dust. My weight sits low and wide, a heavy man's weight, and the breath goes in shallow, stopped by a belly pressed against the polo. My right leg is bouncing. I did not tell it to. It has been bouncing for forty-five years.

The vest first. Its mesh rubs the back of my neck, and the polo is damp under it, and then the morning arrives that is not mine: his thumbs working the buttons of the placket in the dark kitchen, the shirt still stiff from the dryer, a smell of the detergent he buys because she used to. He pulled on the cargo pants sitting on the edge of the bed, the left knee clicking, and he stopped with the vest in his lap and looked at the pale stripe on his ring finger. He rubbed it with his thumb as if it might fill back in.

I touch the box. Cardboard, a taped seam, and suddenly a girl, nine, shouting from a back seat about a song, and the ache of Saturdays only. The scanner strapped to my wrist hums, and under its plastic is a night he told no one: sitting in the truck outside a woman's apartment, the recent one, the one who left in October, engine off, rehearsing a sentence he never said. He doesn't drink. He sat there with a thermos of coffee going cold, and the church bulletin on the dash from a Sunday he went alone.

My shoulder aches, an old pull. My hand lifts to the right ear and finds it: thickened, lumpy, hot under the fingers. A mat, a gym in a basement, a cracked-rib laugh. It was the only year he felt dangerous. My jaw is smooth. He shaved before dawn, carefully, so he'd look like a man with somewhere to be. I feel the dyed hair combed over the thin place and a sudden shame that isn't mine and burns anyway.

I lift my hand from the shelf and look at it. Thick fingers, a pale ring-band of skin. I turn it over, and over again. Then I look up.

"Huh," I say, in a voice that sits deep in the chest. "Okay. You're heavier than you look."

The leg keeps bouncing. Somewhere under it, already, is the small cold question of how long.