Desmond Pettaway

You are standing in Curtis Ellerbee's kitchen in Boston, in his body, and the coffee in his hand has gone lukewarm. You have been him for less than a minute. It is enough. His knees ache when he leans on the counter, his belly presses the edge of it, and his breath smells of the first cigarette he swore he would not have. The scar through his eyebrow itches. What sent you back is small. You reached for something in him, a name, a way of doing the thing he does best, and there was only the wall of him, smooth and blank, and a sales-floor patter that is not yours. He cannot give you what you wanted. So you set the cup down, the page is already open, and the wheel goes round. You do not decide. You stop being him in the middle of a swallow.

Now there is porcelain under your left hand, cold and slick, and a toothbrush in your mouth, mid-stroke. Foam sits on your lip. The tap is running, a thin bright rope into the basin. You are tall. The floor is a long way down, and the weight of the belly sits easy, the way a thing sits when it has been carried for years. Your eyes are on nothing. A gray light comes through the window over the tub.

You stop brushing. Then you start again on the other side, slower, working the back molars, because they seem to want it. Your jaw knows the angle. Your right hand knows the stroke before you do.

The shirt comes first, soft and washed thin, black cotton against your back. A flash, and it is his: the drawer in the dark, his wife asleep, the cotton pulled over his head one-armed because the left shoulder catches. He is thinking of nothing. He is thinking of the bus pass, of whether the kid called back. The waistband of the pajama pants is a drawstring knotted twice, and under your thumb it gives you a Sunday, a kitchen, a daughter at the table with a college letter flat under her palm, and the loud, stupid, proud noise he made. His chest remembers it. You hold the sink and let it go through you.

The ring is on your left hand, thin gold, warm. Turning it with your thumb brings the church-basement hall, folding chairs, a woman laughing at him while he fumbled the vow, and twenty-six years that follow it in a rush: her feet against his shins in winter, the argument about the roof, the way she says his name when she is tired. He loves her. It is not yours, and it is enormous, and it sits in your throat.

The upper ear aches faintly where the cartilage is pierced. A bet, a night, his brother-in-law laughing. He never took it out. The slippers under your feet are worn flat at the heel. The carpet, the bath mat, the grit of old toothpaste on the counter under your wrist. Somewhere in him there is a glass-walled office, a door he keeps open on purpose so the people who work for him will know they can walk in. Somewhere is a drink or two most evenings, and a quiet that he calls prayer, though he would never say so. Nothing in him is a secret. That surprises you. It is only a man who tried.

You rinse. Once, and again. You stand the brush bristles-up in the cup, out of the gray water it has always sat in, and you do not know why.

Then you look at your hands. Broad, freckled across the knuckles, the ring catching the window. You turn them over. They are yours now, warm, and nobody inside them objects. You lift your eyes to the mirror and the long, bearded face looks back, freckled across the nose and cheeks, brown eyes steady.

"Morning, Desmond," you say, low, to see how it sounds.

It sounds fine. Down the hall a floorboard creaks, and she is awake. You think: how long. A year, a week, until the wanting comes back. You wipe your mouth on the back of his wrist and wait to find out.