Jesse Trumbull

You are Lester Whitaker, and you have been him for less than a minute. The accountant's body is still warm from the chair in El Paso. Your thumb is rubbing the dimple of a knuckle. Through the blinds, the morning is white and flat. A ledger sits open on the screen. His wife's name is on a sticky note, and you do not care. You tried the goatee against your palm, found it bored you, and the wanting came back before you finished the coffee. Something he could not do, something about the way his voice would not drop when you needed it to, the way he would not be hurried. Your thumb finds the site. The wheel turns. You do not say why, not even to yourself.

Then the keys.

Your fingers are already moving, left hand on the modifier, right on the arrow, a motion done ten thousand times. Your own eyes are on the window. The motion goes wrong. A half second, the wrong key, the cursor leaping. You stop. You do it again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, each one proven, on a job that has not needed checking in years.

Standing. Your calves hold you up on the cold concrete. The desk is raised to your ribs. There is a cold coffee at your left, a paper cup with a cardboard sleeve, and a tangle of white earbud wire. Headphones sit warm around your neck. Past the glass, a brick wall says DIN, the rest of it gone, the diner closed.

Your right hand drifts up and touches your face. It finds the stubble, then the scar through the eyebrow. Something opens.

The hoodie. Navy, washed soft. This morning he pulled it off the chair in the dark, the left sleeve inside out, and his wife laughed from the bed and fixed it with two fingers while the child slept in the next room. The cuff is frayed where he chews it. A warmth comes with it, and under the warmth the arithmetic: the number on the loan statement, the number after it. It sits in his stomach like a swallowed stone. He has not told her how deep. He rehearses telling her in the shower.

The keyboard. His thumb knows the worn spot on the spacebar. A night two years ago, a deploy gone bad, the whole town dark outside and him alone in this room until sunrise, saving a company that would not remember. Pride, small and private.

The wedding band, cool, a little loose in winter. The geometric ink on the back of the hand: he drew the first lines himself on a napkin, at nineteen, with a girl who is not his wife, and the memory is gentle and unfinished. The cigarette he does not reach for anymore. The ache in the hand that wants one.

The floor. The sneakers. Gray, broken in, one lace shorter. Five foot eight, a back that has stood too long and says so low on the right. He is thirty. He is tired in a way sleep does not touch. He has not had a drink in years, and that was also a choice made in a kitchen.

You lift your hand and turn it over. The ink, the ring, the pale lines of his palm. Not yours. Yours now.

You look up, into the glass, into whoever is there, and you say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Somewhere the wheel is already waiting.