Gregory Tomaszewski

The apartment is quiet the way locksmith shops get quiet at closing, and you are standing in Andrés Colima's kitchen not doing anything, which is the problem. Twenty hours and thirty-six minutes in this body and you already know its whole shape: the callus map on the fingers, the itch of a healed patch of skin gone pale on the forearm, the particular ease of a wrist that has turned ten thousand pin-tumblers and can feel a lock's mood through a screwdriver. It's a good body. Athletic, young, quick. You picked the lockpicks up twice tonight just to feel the fit of them in his hands, and both times you put them down again, because there is nothing to unlock. That's the trouble with a body that works — it stops being interesting by the second night. You are not tired of him. You are tired of knowing exactly what tomorrow in him will feel like. So you open the laptop, and there's the wheel, sitting in a tab you never closed, patient as a doorman, and your — his — thumb is already moving before you've decided anything at all.

The spin lands you mid-motion, mouth full of foam, a molar under the brush, the water running loud in a small tiled room. The switch from one weight to another is instant and total: shorter reach now, thinner through the shoulders, a looseness in the knees that reads as age rather than ease. The toothbrush keeps going on its own, muscle before mind, working the back teeth slower now, more careful, the way a man brushes when he's not really watching himself do it. You rinse. Spit. Rinse again. Stand the brush up bristles-first out of graying water in a cup that has clearly held this same brush, this same water, for years.

The shirt is what opens first — long-sleeve, worn soft at the elbows, and putting it on this morning comes back sleeve by sleeve, not yours but arriving anyway: the fumble of getting an arm through half-asleep, Danielle's voice from the other room asking if he'd seen Micah's inhaler, the small satisfaction of a shirt that still fits the way it did ten years ago even if the hair on top of the head wearing it has gone the color of the sink. Gregory Tomaszewski. The name comes with the shirt, somehow, the way your own name never has to be summoned. Forty-one years in Philadelphia, on white marble steps his grandfather scrubbed on Saturdays same as everyone did on that block, in a rowhouse that still smells like radiator heat in November.

The lighter is in the sweatpants pocket, and your — his — hand finds it without being told to, thumb already flicking the wheel though there's no cigarette waiting on it, because he quit before the kids were born and the habit outlived the reason. Flick, flick, a little metal comfort. It brings back Danielle's laugh at how he does that in job interviews, in waiting rooms, at the kitchen table with the laptop open to listings that all want somebody younger or somebody cheaper. Eleven months unemployed now. The dimples show even when he's not trying to be pleasant about it, which the interviewers seem to find disarming and which he has come to resent a little, this face that keeps looking friendlier than he feels.

The tap water on his fingers brings the ex — Carla, a year gone, the divorce quieter than either of them expected, the kids splitting nights between two houses four blocks apart, close enough that Micah still calls this the big house without meaning anything by it. The grief there isn't sharp. It's more like the ache in his lower back when he stands too long at this sink — old, expected, something he has learned to fold laundry around.

His body: skinny, always has been, a metabolism nobody in his family understood, hair gone silver early and then honest about leaving at the temples the way his father's did, both of them laughing about it once at a wedding neither of them attended together after that. Feet cold on the bathroom tile. A dull ready ache low in the back from sitting at that kitchen table too many hours a day sending resumes into silence. Hands that don't know how to do much with tools but know exactly how to hold a two-year-old's weight against a hip, how to work a lighter open one-handed, how to tie a shoe for a kid too impatient to learn.

The faucet runs. You shut it off with his hand, and the quiet afterward is the same quiet Danielle is probably sitting in two rooms over, waiting for him to come to bed.

You look down. The hand is thinner than the one you had an hour ago, the knuckles bigger somehow, a wedding ring gone but its ghost still there in a paler band nobody would notice unless they were looking. You turn it over once, like checking a coin came up the side you wanted.

Then you look up into the mirror, into hazel eyes that are running the routine again — same water, same brush — not because he told them to, but because you haven't decided yet if you're going to.

"Well," you say to the fogged glass, in his voice, "guess we'll see how tonight goes."