Gerald Fontaine

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Kevin Truong's line station smells like fryer oil no amount of showering gets out, and that's the smell you wake up to at 2 a.m. in his skinny-fat body, lying on his back on a mattress that isn't yours, staring at a popcorn ceiling that isn't yours either, thinking: not this again. Two days and twelve hours of being twenty-nine hours from close every single shift, of a manager who calls him "buddy" like it's a leash, of a body that gets short of breath climbing one flight and has heartburn baked into its bones. Nothing happened to you here. That's the problem. Nothing happens to you here. You get up in the dark, quiet so as not to wake a roommate who isn't yours either, and you open the laptop, and there's the wheel, waiting the way it always waits, patient as a drain.

You spin it not for a reason you'd say out loud, only for the old one underneath all the others: the itch of being the same person two nights running.

—

The coin leaves your thumb.

You feel the small dumb ceremony of it complete — the flick, the follow-through, a wish already half-forgotten in the shape of a habit — and the water should take it turning, catching green light in little flashes as it goes down, and instead it goes in straight and true and wrong, no spin at all, gone. The splash folds inward like it's being swallowed rather than made. You are standing over a mall fountain at closing with a weight in your knees and a whistle low in your chest when you breathe, and this body is not the one you had a half a second ago. It is heavier through the middle, shorter, older, standing in boots instead of the sneakers you can feel from underneath as if from far away, and you stay bent over the lip of the tile a while, not moving, because moving is going to require finding out what you are now.

—

The flannel shirt is the first thing that talks to you. It's been worn enough that it knows the shape of these shoulders better than a new shirt would, and touching your own forearm where the sleeve is rolled gives you a flash — a bathroom mirror, fluorescent and unkind, a hand buttoning this same shirt one-handed while the other holds a vape between two fingers, a woman's voice from another room saying something about the electric bill, easy, unbothered, the kind of voice that's said ten thousand ordinary things to you across thirty years of marriage. Cheryl. Her name arrives with the shirt and doesn't need explaining. You've buttoned this shirt for her more mornings than either of you would ever count.

The wedding band on the left hand is warm from your own skin already, and it gives you a wedding — not the whole day, just an afternoon of it, humidity thick enough to chew, a church with the fans going, her in white looking at you like you were the good decision instead of the safe one, and you'd smiled with all your teeth then, both of them, before the one up front went missing in a bar argument nine years later that you don't remember starting and definitely remember losing. Your tongue finds the gap out of old habit that isn't yours yet and already is.

There's a photograph you carry folded in a back pocket — you feel its shape before you feel what's on it — and touching the outline of it through denim gives you a boy, thirteen now, all knees and opinions, who calls you Pop and thinks the night job is boring, doesn't know yet that boring is a thing a man chooses on purpose because the alternative, the thing that pays better, wanted him somewhere he wasn't willing to go. One kid. Enough.

The belt with the flashlight and the ring of keys against your hip brings the lobby up whole: the marble too polished to be honest, the elevator bank hum, forty-one years old the building is and you've worked its nights for six of them, a folding chair with a bad leg, a logbook, the particular boredom of 3 a.m. that isn't unhappiness, just a long flat road with a paycheck at the end good enough that the money sitting elsewhere — the house paid off, the account nobody at the desk would guess at — never had to be spent loud. You like the quiet of it. You've never once told anyone that out loud, the liking. It would sound like giving up, and it isn't. It's arithmetic that finally balanced.

Your lungs pull at the air a little wrong, a catch on the inhale that's older than tonight, an inhaler somewhere in a jacket pocket you're not wearing right now, and the memory of needing it — gasping through a summer cut grass, gasping up these same lobby stairs when the elevator's down — sits under the ribs like weather. Your hand, without you asking it to, wants a lighter that isn't there. Some habit deeper than the mind, flicking a wheel that doesn't exist in this pocket, over and over, wanting the small flame more than the cigarette.

The morning this shirt went on comes back last and softest — Cheryl's hip against the counter, coffee, the vape passed back and forth like a joke between them though she'll say she's making him quit, the mall shift starting late enough that there'd been time for this, for a whole ordinary hour that neither of them thought to keep. He'd known, buttoning it, that he'd stop by the fountain on the way to work like always, coin from the dish by the door, wish already picked before he left the driveway. He never told anyone what he wished. He's not going to start now.

—

You straighten up off the lip of the fountain, and you look down at your own right hand — thick-fingered, sun-spotted, the band catching the green fountain light — and you turn it over slow, like it might be somebody else's left where you set it down.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the water, to the coin already gone.