Gary Belletire

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Nabil Shaheen's office chair creaks under weight that isn't yours but is, now, for three more minutes. Saturday light slants across a desk you don't own, in a life you rented off a spinning wheel an hour ago. The gap in his front teeth keeps catching your tongue, still a stranger's furniture in a stranger's mouth. You made him sign off on a deal Thursday that will cost forty people their Christmas bonuses and he doesn't even know it yet, poor bastard, and that's the thing — you're bored of watching him not know things. Fifty-five and muscular-fat and gray at the temples same as the last one and the one before that, and none of it is yours to keep, so why keep any of it. You open the laptop. The wheel is already loaded, already spinning in your head before your finger touches the trackpad. You pay. You spin.

The pan is hot under your hand before you are anyone.

Then you are the hand. Steel handle, real weight, real heat coming up through it, and your body — his body, tall, loose in the shoulders, a soreness low in the back you didn't ask for — turns the wooden spoon through onions and something dark and rich, and mid-circle you stop, because you are new here and the motion belongs to someone else's wrist. You start it again the other way, clumsy, overcorrecting, and salt falls into the pan without you tasting it, salt on salt maybe, you don't know, you weren't here for the first shake. Your free hand — his hand, ringed — reaches up into the cabinet and comes down with a second plate and sets it, without your permission, beside the plate already on the counter.

Then the shirt.

Flannel, soft from wear, and touching it is like putting your hand into water that used to be a river: a Tuesday months back, gray light through the same window, buttoning this same shirt one-handed while the coffee maker coughed behind him, Ruthie's photograph propped against the toaster where he'd moved it after she went into the ground so it would be the first thing every morning instead of the last thing every night. He does that now. Sets a place for her sometimes without deciding to, the way hands remember a step count on stairs that got torn out years ago. Thirty-one years married and the last four of them just him, learning the particular arithmetic of cooking for one and always, always making too much.

The whistle at his throat isn't around his neck now — that's gym clothes, that's Monday — but your palm remembers its weight anyway, remembers blowing it across a mat while a hundred-and-forty-pound sixteen-year-old learned, in real time, what it costs to want something more than the boy across from him. Thirty years of that gym. The particular smell of the room, rubber and old radiator heat, is in this kitchen too somehow, ghosted into the man's skin, because a body that's coached that long carries the gym into every room it walks through. Your knees — his knees — know the mat the way his hands know a spoon.

The jeans give you less, just denim and a little give at the knee where he's knelt beside a hurt kid a thousand times to say get up, you're fine, walk it off. The wedding band gives you everything at once and you have to stand still through it: a courthouse, a hospital room decades later, her hand smaller than the ring by the end, and him not taking the thing off after, not once, not even to shower, because it never occurred to him there was a reason to.

Two sons, grown, one in Baton Rouge and one further than that, phone calls on Sundays that run four minutes and feel like more. A church basement with bad coffee and a folding chair he's sat in every Wednesday for six years, not because the ache ever left but because sitting with it in a room full of other people who also would not taste it took some of the salt out. Kidney stones twice, the second one bad enough that a nurse half his age called him brave for not making a sound, and him thinking, privately, that silence was just the only sound he had left by then. A tin of pouches in his shirt pocket, felt now against your chest like a coin you didn't put there — nicotine, since the drinking stopped mattering enough to quit, sometime around year two without her, when he noticed the whiskey wasn't doing anything the quiet wasn't already doing better.

The second plate sits there. You did that, or he did, muscle deeper than memory, and it isn't sad exactly, standing here in it — it's just a fact of the room, like the steam starting to fog the window over the sink, like the sun that must be out there past it because the facts of this borrowed Saturday insist that it is, a wet street somewhere outside going bright.

You look down. His hands, ring and all, spoon still in the right one, and they are not shaking, which surprises the part of you that used to be someone smaller.

You set the spoon down across the pan and say, to the empty kitchen, in his voice, rough with a Louisiana Saturday and thirty years of a whistle worn thin, "Guess I'm still cooking for two."

Nobody answers. You don't know how long that's going to be true.