Efrain Molsky

Six minutes is nothing. Six minutes is a sunset that hasn't finished happening yet, and already your thumb is moving toward the little red spin icon on the phone propped against the streaming rig, and part of you — the part still faintly ashamed, the part that used to be someone else too — knows this is the whole problem with Bryce Halloran. He's twenty-six and built like a door and the chat is screaming at you to do a shirtless bit, and there is nothing wrong with him, nothing at all, except that you can already feel the shape of every minute you'll spend in him: gym, banter, gym, banter, sleep you don't need in a body that recovers too fast to be interesting. You have been him six minutes and you are already bored in the specific, itchy way that only comes from knowing exactly what a thing is for. You open the site. The wheel loads slow on his cracked phone screen, spinning colors, and you think, not for the first time, that boredom is the only honest reason you've ever had, dressed up three hundred and ninety-five other times as curiosity.

It lands on a man hosing suds off a station wagon in a Chicago driveway, early evening, concrete going gray-blue with the streetlight buzzing on early behind him.

And then you are him.

The hose is still running somewhere near your foot, hissing against wet concrete. The sponge is heavy and cold in your hand, dragging a long soapy arc down the door panel, and your body — shorter than the one you just left, forty-five years of it, thicker through the middle, a low persistent ache low in your back that has nothing to do with effort — takes over the motion before you do. Thumb tucks under the sponge without you telling it to. Wrist turns in small circles, the pattern of a man who has washed this car two hundred times and stopped needing to watch his own hands do it. The swirl marks stop appearing behind you on the door. For one half-second you and he are both driving, and then it's only you.

The shirt is what opens first — green cotton, sweat-damp at the collar, clinging in the specific way of a shirt worn through a whole humid afternoon — and it gives you the morning it went on: a bedroom with the blinds half down, his wife already downstairs running water for coffee, him pulling this exact shirt over his head one-armed while the other hand fumbled a sock, thinking about nothing except whether the Andersons' cat would need a second round of antibiotics or whether that abscess was finally clearing. Efrain. The name arrives with the shirt, easy, unglamorous, his. Efrain Molsky, DVM, a name that's been on a clinic door in Logan Square for fourteen years, under the L tracks, where the trains still make the exam tables hum faintly on their mounts.

The sponge in your hand gives you more — rougher, older. His father's hands, actually, teaching him to wash a car in a Little Village driveway thirty years back, a lecture about doing a thing right even when nobody's grading you on it. Cuban coffee smell. A different, older car. And under that, quieter, the wedding band on your left hand, plain gold, warm from the day, and with it a wash of two marriages folding into each other — the first one, brief and loud and over by thirty-one, a woman named Carla whose voice still lives somewhere in your molars when you're tired; and this one, the one that stuck, sixteen years now, two kids who are teenagers and unimpressed by both their parents equally. The scrubs you wore this morning are inside on a hook, gone slightly gray-blue no matter how many washes, the small custom paw-print pattern he picked himself, a little vain about it, a little proud — the vet who has a signature print, ridiculous and his. That stethoscope hanging in the mudroom still carries this morning's exam room: a dog with a torn nail, a cat that hissed, the particular tired satisfaction of being good at a small unglamorous thing for a living, of being trusted by people with their frightened animals held against their chests.

Your left thumb finds the cuticle of your ring finger without being asked and starts working at it, an old unconscious habit, and with it comes a flash of the doctor's office six months ago, the blood pressure cuff, the mild lecture, the pills in the cabinet you take without much feeling either way. Not afraid. Just a fact of the body, like the ache in the low back, like the thickness through the middle that used to not be there. Forty-five feels, right now, standing in wet grass-smelling air with soap sliding down your forearm, entirely survivable. Good, even. A body that knows how to be gentle with something small and hurting, because it's had to learn.

The water is still running. Somewhere behind this driveway a train comes through, and the whole yard hums for four seconds, and you know without being told that this happens forty times a day and he stopped hearing it around year two.

You look down at your hand — thick fingers, a plain gold ring, a sponge going soft and cold in your palm — and you turn it over slowly, watching the suds run off it into the grass, and it is not your hand, it has never once been your hand, and somewhere in Los Angeles a beautiful bored twenty-six-year-old man's body is standing in front of a ring light with nobody driving it at all.

You lift your eyes toward the house, where a light just came on in the kitchen window, and you say, quiet, mostly to yourself:

"Okay. Okay — one more car."