Dwight Pruett

You are standing at a bathroom mirror in Honolulu, before the light, and the gap between your front teeth is a place your tongue keeps going. Fifty-nine. Skinny, quick, easy in the knees. A man who manages a store and knows where the key to the back room hangs. He has been yours for less than a minute of the long years you have been doing this, and already you know what is wrong with him. His coffee is too good. His wife, somewhere in the house, is humming. Everything about him is arranged to be kept, and you cannot stand to keep anything. You wanted to be somebody whose day has weight in it, and this man's day weighs what a paper bag weighs. So you do the thing. You open the page. The wheel turns under your thumb like a throat swallowing.

The board clicks to 48 and your knee stops.

You are sitting. Third seat from the door. The strip light hums over your head and its white lies flat on the crown of your skull, where the hair has gone thin and the air touches scalp. A paper cup sits on the little table by your elbow, water gone warm. You set it down square, though it was already down. Your hands fold. There is a big soft weight in front of you, a belly under a green polo, and your breath moves around it slowly. A name is called from a doorway. You do not look up.

The jacket comes first, the navy nylon at your shoulders, and the zipper pull is cold against your wrist. A flash that isn't yours: a cold morning, a closet, a wife's voice saying take the jacket, it'll be freezing in there, and him saying it's Texas, and taking it anyway. The polo is soft from a hundred washes. He pulled it over his head slowly this morning because the left shoulder complains in the mornings, and he stopped halfway and breathed, and she did not see. The khakis have a crease from the dryer. He buttoned them under the belly with his thumbs the way you'd close a gate. The sneakers are wide and gray, bought because his feet hurt, and he laced them sitting on the edge of the bed with a grunt, one then the other, resting between.

The chair arm is cool plastic under your wrist. Under your tongue is the ghost of a dip, the sweet bitter packed lip he hasn't had since last night. He wants it badly, and it shames him a little in a place like this. Your thumb finds the ring on the left hand and turns it. The band is loose with age and heat, and with it comes a porch, a gravel road, a barbed-wire fence, a water tower on the horizon like a pin in a map. A woman laughing at something he said about the dog. Two grown children on a phone speaker, both talking at once. He prays on that porch, short and plain, and means it. Under the others lies an older girl, a girl from before, a screen door and a summer, and he has told no one that he still thinks of her when a certain song plays. It is not a sin, he decides each time. It is only a room he does not go into.

The waiting room smells of floor wax and old coffee. Your heart is going, a little fast and a little heavy. He is afraid. Whatever they will say behind that door, he rehearsed it all morning, and he never told his wife how scared he was. He drove himself.

Now you lift your hands from your lap. They are wide and pink, the knuckles thick, the wedding band pressed into the flesh. You turn them over. Palm, then back. Then you raise your eyes.

"Well," you say, in a voice that comes up slow and low from somewhere under the belly. "Let's see how long you last."

The name is called again. You do not know yet whether you will answer it.