Glenn Haverty

You are leaving Mohan Rajagopal, who has been yours for less than a minute. His kitchen in El Paso is gray with the hour before work. His knees ache from the truck he hasn't climbed into yet. His thumb rests on the wheel's gold rim, and the coffee beside the phone is going cold, because the thing that sent you back is simple. In the minute you wore him you opened his phone, and the only name on it was a daughter who has not answered him in two years. It is not your daughter, and you cannot stop reading it. So you spin.

The dark arrives first, then the blue. Your cheek is lit and a phone floats six inches from your face. The thumb is mid-scroll, and the arm under your head has gone half numb. The mattress is soft and sagging under a heavy body, and a fan turns somewhere. Your thumb moves again, faster than his was, and the feed streams past.

The sheet under your calf is cool, and it gives you a memory that is his and not yours. It is a night years ago, the mattress new and a woman laughing because the frame was too tall to climb. Then the phone is warm in your palm, and you feel the case he chose. He chose it because a boy once dropped the old one in a creek. A third child, then. Maybe a fourth. His chest holds the knowledge of them the way a house holds a sleeping family. You do not have their names.

The cotton shirt is soft from a thousand washes. As it shifts over your shoulder you get the morning of some other day: his big hands tucking a polo into khakis in a trailer bathroom, the hard desert light slicing through the blinds. He clicks a pen against his thigh, not thinking about it, and the badge on its retractable clip snaps back against his belt. His office has glass walls and the door stays open because he wants to be someone people can walk up to. It cost him a long time to learn that.

The ring is a plain band, slightly tight on a finger that has thickened since the wedding. It brings her up: his wife, asleep somewhere close in the dark, a warmth he can feel without looking. Under it, deeper, is another woman, the one who got away. She comes as a smell of rain on hot pavement and a ache without an address. He never told anyone, and you know it now.

At the collar, the tattoo itches. There is a name there, and a date, in script. Your fingertip finds it through the cloth and the grief is instant and old and folded small, like a note kept in a wallet. You don't read it. You can't. It is his.

The body is strong. The shoulders are dense, the forearms hard, the stomach tight from mornings you now remember in pieces, a garage and iron plates. Your face already knows how to dimple. It happens at rest, and you feel the creases deepen against your cheeks with nothing pulling them. Money sits quietly somewhere behind him, years of careful saving, and a calm comes from it that is not yours but fits.

You let the phone go slack. You turn your hand over in the blue light and see the ring, the knuckles, the pale band of skin under it. You look up, and the dimples show.

"Well," you say, in his low voice. "Hello, Glenn."

And already, small and bright under your ribs, something asks how long you get to keep him.