Donald Sechrist

Gary Thibodeaux's kitchen is quiet at eleven at night, the fryer cold, the rubber mat under your feet — his feet — still smelling faintly of bleach water from close. You stand there in his dad bod, his aching lower back, his blond hair damp at the hairline, and you feel it again: the itch that brought you back so soon. Less than a minute in this man and you already know the shape of the problem. Gary owes somebody at the restaurant money he keeps not mentioning to his wife, and there's a supervisor named Sechrist who covers for him, softens the schedule, has for years, out of some old debt Gary himself doesn't fully understand — you got that much from the apron strings when you tied them, a flash of gratitude gone sour into shame. You don't want to be the man who owes. You want to be the man who's owed, or at least the man who doesn't carry it. So you go to the site on Gary's phone, thumb still clumsy in this body, and you spin.

The bathroom light is fluorescent and unkind and it is not your light. You are bent at the sink, weight on the left hand flat against cold porcelain, and the razor is already moving — up along the jaw, against the grain, no pause at the corner of the mouth where apparently someone always pauses. You finish the second side faster than the first, the way a man does a thing he's done ten thousand mornings, except this is the first time you've done it, and the water runs warm over three fingers you didn't know you had a second ago.

The polo shirt is against your back and it opens first: a closet in a house with beige carpet, hangers that stick, a wife's voice from the next room asking if he packed his meter. Blood sugar. Donald Sechrist, sixty-four, and the diabetes sits in him like a low hum he's stopped noticing, the way you stop noticing a fridge running. The shirt gives you the morning he bought it, a Kohl's rack, his wife holding it up and saying that color again, Don, and him letting her win because it was never a fight worth having.

The khakis at your hips give you a longer stretch — thirty-one years at a casino on the Strip, surveillance and then floor security and then, the last decade, just walking rounds because they liked having him there, a face the regulars trusted. Retired eight months now. The porch you were on this morning with the coffee comes back sideways, out of order, the way memory does when it isn't yours: the heat already up at ten a.m., the mug he's had since a work anniversary, the quiet that retirement turned out to be instead of the relief he'd promised his wife it would be.

The wedding band is cold and plain against your left hand where it braces the sink, and that one goes deepest. Forty years married. One son, grown, in Henderson now with kids of his own, and Don's chest does something when he thinks of him that isn't quite pride and isn't quite worry, some married thing between the two. Church on Sundays, the kind where people actually know your name. A beer with the guys sometimes, never more than two anymore, doctor's orders, and he doesn't miss the cigarettes most days, only after dinner, only a little.

And under all of it, the body itself: sixty-four and skinny with it, not gaunt, just a man who never filled out, forearms ropy from decades of stairs and rounds, a twinge low in the right knee that means rain sometime this week even in a desert. Green eyes tired in the mirror light. Hands that know a straight razor's angle without thinking, the same way they know how to break up an argument at a blackjack table without raising their voice.

You straighten up from the sink. Foam still on the left half of the jaw you haven't gotten to, though of course you already did — his hands did it while you were still becoming them, quick and sure and finished before you'd caught up.

You look down at your left hand, the ring catching the bathroom light, and turn it over slow, like it belongs to somebody you're about to ask something of.

"Didn't feel a thing," you say to the mirror, and you don't know yet if that's relief.