Dwight Lamar Pettigrew

You are twenty-seven and heavy and warm, and you have been Adrián Zamora for less than a minute. You are standing in his kitchen in Houston with a stack of ungraded essays and his thumb already sore from the red pen. The first thing he gave you was a good laugh in the chest. The second was a cold fact: he cannot stand to be looked at. You felt it the moment you passed the hallway mirror. He turns his face away from it by habit, a quarter inch, like a man avoiding a draft. You did not want a body that flinches from itself. You wanted to be looked at, and he will not allow it. So you open the page with his thumb and watch the wheel go.

It lands on a bathroom in Pittsburgh.

The brushing stops mid-stroke. Foam on your lip, the tap running, your eyes on nothing. Cold tile through the socks. You start again on the other side, slower, working the back molars, because the mouth already knows where the soreness is.

The flannel is soft with washing, and the sleeves are rolled once at the wrist. The shirt gives you the morning in his hands, not yours. The undershirt first, gray, pulled over the head in the dark so the bed would stay quiet. Then the flannel off the chair, one arm and then the other, and a button he always misses and always fixes. Jeans that have gone slack at the knee. A wife turns over in the bed behind him. He thinks, *eleven more years of this and we'll buy the porch*. It is not a complaint.

The sink edge is cold under your palm. The ring clicks on the porcelain, and it brings her: a kitchen, her laughing at how badly he dances, his whole chest going quiet with gratitude. There is another woman in the ring too, older, the first marriage, and it brings no bitterness, only a long tiredness and two children who are now taller than the tired. His daughter's voice on the phone says *Dad, you don't have to come*, and he goes anyway.

Your back aches in the low place where thirty years of trenches live. Your shoulders are broad and your hands are quick. They know the weight of a shovel and the exact give of wet clay. Fifty years old. The studs in his ears are cool. He quit smoking and still reaches for his shirt pocket when he is worried. Your fingers do it now.

You rinse twice. You stand the brush bristles-up, out of the grey water it has always sat in, and you look at the water going down.

Then you look at his hand. The ring, the knuckles scarred pale, the skin dry from cement. You turn it over. You lift your eyes to the mirror and nothing in the face flinches away, and you hold there.

"Hello," you say, in a voice that is low and unhurried and no one's but his. "Hello, Dwight."

The tap is still running. You do not know how long you get to be him. You only know that you are afraid of how much you like being looked at like this.