Denny Okafune

The Atlanta bus does not leave the yard for another hour, and Roger Passalino is already awake in the dark of a house that isn't his, sitting on the edge of a bed that isn't his, listening to a wife who isn't his breathing in her sleep. You have been him for eleven minutes. You know his knees already — bad, both of them, the left worse — because you stood up too fast in the bathroom and they told you about it. You know he keeps a beauty mark by his mouth because you saw it in the mirror and thought, stranger's face, same as always. Eleven minutes in a heavy body with a bus route in six hours is not a reason. It is barely a feeling. But the feeling is there anyway, small and certain: you did not spin twenty-seven times to sit on the edge of somebody's bed and wait for an alarm. You get up. Knees complain. You find the phone, you find the site, you do not let yourself think about the woman asleep behind you, because she was never yours to think about. You pay. You spin.

The wheel doesn't show you the road. It shows you a sink.

You are bent at the waist, weight on a cane jammed against white tile, half your jaw foamed and cold, and the razor is already moving — up, against the grain, no pause where a mouth like this one should pause — and it finishes the second side faster than the first, like it has done this ten thousand times without you. Your knees — his knees — lock under you, one worse than the other, and a fluorescent tube buzzes too close overhead. Outside the window behind the shower curtain the sky is the flat gray of a Detroit morning that hasn't decided to start yet. You are short. You are wide through the middle in a way Roger never was. The cane under your left hand is real wood, worn smooth where a thumb has worried it for years.

The razor is the first thing that talks to you. Not words — a Tuesday, thirty years gone, a straight razor his father used, folded shut, the smell of Barbasol in a cold apartment on Vernor. Then this one, cheap, disposable, bought six-to-a-pack because Mei always says why spend more, and you feel the small guilty pleasure he takes anyway in the good foam, the kind in the can with the blue cap, his one vanity. The dimples come with the thought of her name — they're there even now, foam and all, denting in at rest, and you didn't put them there, they were always going to be there, they are the first thing anyone ever says about him at the yard: *Denny, man, you got a face like a kid.*

The cane gives you more. It gives you the highway shoulder, headlights strobing past too close, the particular cold of 3 a.m. in October with the flatbed's amber light turning everything the color of a warning, and the knee that gave out on him coming down off a wrecked Silverado's frame five years back, wrong, sudden, a sound he still hears sometimes in his sleep. Nobody's fault. Comp paid what comp pays. He never told the guys how much it still catches him getting in and out of the cab, how the cane lives behind the seat now, how he times his walk around the trucks so nobody clocks it. Pride is a small ugly thing and he knows it and keeps it anyway.

The tank undershirt against your back gives you Sunday — not today, some Sunday, a hundred Sundays folded into one — Mass at Sweetest Heart with Mei's hand tucked into his arm going up the steps slow because he won't take the handrail in front of people, and their son Kevin, thirty-one now, calling after because he missed it again, work, always work, and Denny saying it's fine, it's fine, meaning it every time and it never quite being fine. The undershirt is thin at the shoulder from washing. He put it on eleven hours ago after a shower that ran too long because the hot water finally works right since he fixed the heater himself, on his knees on the basement floor with a wrench and a flashlight in his teeth, muttering that he didn't survive forty years of night calls to pay a plumber two hundred dollars for twenty minutes.

The wedding band is old gold gone soft at the edges. Thirty-eight years. Twenty-two-year-old Denny too shy to say it right, an ex before her — Carol, a name that still surfaces sometimes on nothing at all, a girl from the old neighborhood he half-loved at nineteen and let go of the way you let go of a kite string on a good day, no grief in it, just wind. Mei is the one who stayed. Mei is the one asleep two rooms away right now not knowing the man leaning on the sink humming under his breath at the mirror is not, this second, entirely the man who married her.

The lighter is in the pants pocket, cold brass, and even not holding it your hand knows the flip, thumb-strike, snap shut, a habit from nowhere — he never smoked a day, doesn't drink much either, two beers at Kevin's wedding and that was the year's allowance — just something his hands do while his mind runs the next tow, the next merge, the exit ramp where the semis always jackknife in ice. Worry with nowhere else to go.

You look down. Short thick fingers, foam drying at the wrist, a plain ring, a cane leaned against the sink like it's always been there because for him it always has. The dimples are still in the mirror, denting a face that isn't panicked, isn't anything yet, because he never got the chance to be.

You set the razor down on the rim of the sink, careful, the way his hands already know to be careful with things.

"Not bad," you say, out loud, to nobody, in a voice with thirty-eight years and two knees and a whole marriage folded into its Detroit flatness — and you don't know yet if you'll be saying his next line tomorrow, or if the wheel is already spinning somewhere behind your eyes.