Garrett Wexley

The mop bucket is where Brett Halvorsen leaves it, half-full and going gray, and you leave it too, standing over it in his body in a supply closet that smells like bleach and cold concrete. Three minutes. That's all you gave him. His hands — thick-knuckled, a callus map you never earned — are still cold from the tap. You didn't spin again for boredom this time, not exactly. You spun because four hours and twenty minutes ago you were somebody else, somebody younger and smaller and cleaner, a dentist in New Orleans with a shaved head and freckles across the bridge of his nose, and in his house — his actual house, with his actual mail on the counter — you found a photograph on the refrigerator, held by a magnet shaped like a lobster, of a man with a birthmark down the side of his jaw. Brothers. You didn't know it when you took the dentist. You know it now, and once you know a thing like that the wheel feels less like chance and more like a hallway with a door left open. You want to stand on both sides of it. You want to know what it looks like from here.

You pull the phone from your pocket, open the browser bookmark you've already used three times, and you don't hesitate over the fee.

The kitchen arrives before you do — no, that's wrong, you arrive into the kitchen, into the middle of a stir that is already circling counter-clockwise, into a spoon in a hand you have never worn. The pan hisses. Overhead a single bulb throws a warm circle down onto the stove and leaves the rest of the room in shingle-gray dusk from the window over the sink. The stirring stops. It starts again the other way. Salt falls into the pan in a practiced arc, unmeasured, and nobody tastes it, because you don't yet know that's what he always skips. Your free hand — his hand — reaches up into the cabinet without you telling it to and comes down with a second plate, and you set it down next to the first one, and for one full second you have no idea why you did that.

Then the shirt tells you.

Black cotton, soft from a hundred washes, and touching it is like putting a hand on a doorknob that's been warm all day — his morning comes up through it: standing in a bedroom with sloped ceilings, sea-colored light through a low window, pulling this same shirt over his head while a woman's voice comes up the stairs asking if he's taking the truck or the wagon today, and him calling back that he's got the seven o'clock train out of Portland and won't be home till past supper. Sleeping car attendant — the words arrive with the particular ache of standing all night in a swaying corridor, dimming the lamps section by section, laying down berths, learning which passengers want to talk at 2 a.m. and which want the dark left alone. His feet know a rocking floor. His shoulders know low doorframes. There's a tattoo under the sleeve, tribal bands he got at twenty-two with a friend who's dead now, a fact that surfaces and sinks again before you can hold it.

The counter under your — his — free hand is cold laminate, and touching it brings the second plate all the way into focus: he sets two because there are two kids somewhere in this house tonight, probably down the hall already fed and pajama'd, and he is cooking late because his girlfriend picks up a shift on Mondays and he told her he'd have something ready when she got in, one plate for her, one for him, and he already ate with the kids an hour ago but he'll sit with her anyway, because that's what the two plates are for — not food, company. It comes with a warmth that isn't yours, sits in the chest like something borrowed, and under it, fainter, a whole church basement of Wednesday nights, a mother's voice saying grace, the particular guilt of a man who doesn't drink and has never needed to explain why. Somewhere further back, a boy his age smaller and skinnier, sharing a room with another boy, this exact surname stitched into the collar of a Sunday shirt. Colton. You know that name from the other side now — you were inside the brother four hours ago, in a house full of dental molds and a framed diploma, and here is the same last name wearing a completely different life, salt water instead of a bayou, and the two of them never far from each other no matter how far apart the houses sit.

The spoon is still in your hand. You look down at it — at his hand, olive-pale, a thin white scar along one knuckle you don't have a story for yet, the wine-dark birthmark just visible at the edge of your vision along the jaw when you glance toward the window's black reflecting glass. You turn the hand over once, like checking it for something.

"Two plates," you say, out loud, to the empty kitchen, and you don't know yet if that's a question or an answer, or how long you'll be the one standing here to find out.