Liam Patrick Doyle

You are tired of Dale's mouth. That is the plainest way to say it. Dale Brandt Hutchins, twenty-five, six-one, a waiter in a small Ohio town, and you have been him for less than a minute by the clock on the wall above the pass, and already the cleft in his chin is something your tongue keeps finding. Tray on one palm, a table of four waiting on refills. A man at table six has just said "hon" to you, kindly, and nothing in Dale is built to do anything with that. You could have waited. Another body was always going to be one more spin. But it is the middle of a Tuesday morning and the room smells of burnt coffee and syrup, and you are standing in somebody's life you did not choose and have no use for, and underneath that is a thing you will not say even to yourself. You set the tray down. You are already gone.

The potato is in your left hand.

Cold, dense, a little damp. The knife is in your right, and the blade is mid-stroke, and the stroke is wrong. You feel it be wrong: a hitch, the paring blade skating a hair off its line. Then your hand does it again, slowly, correctly, and the skin comes away in one long curl. Then the next potato, and the next, each stroke checked, as if the hand has been startled by something and doesn't know what.

Steel mesh glove on the left hand, tight at the wrist, a plastic tab of blue against the knuckle. Low gray light through the big window, and across a wide street the brick houses stand wet and patient under the sky. Behind you someone scrapes a pan. Your back is damp where the apron strings cross it. Your feet ache in the heavy black shoes, the particular ache of hours, a hard floor mat under the arches.

Then the apron gives you the morning. Canvas, stiff with old starch, the bib strap rough against your neck. Liam pulls it over his head in a cramped apartment bathroom, the shirt already on, black, the third of the same black shirt he owns because it hides everything. He ties the strings behind himself the way he has since nineteen, a double knot, left over right. Gray work pants off the back of a chair, the cuffs gone soft. He hunts for the hairnet and finds it on the radiator. His phone lights on the sink with a message he does not open. Her name, no more than that. Three weeks since she took her toothbrush. He turns the phone face down and the face-down phone is the whole morning.

The knife handle is worn smooth where his fingers have pressed it. From it comes a heat, a first week in this kitchen, the chef, a big patient woman, putting her hand over his and bending his grip: *choke up, you're not hunting with it.* Pride, small and hot, when she nodded. The mesh glove brings the other thing, a night he cut himself anyway, a different glove, a different year, and the quick ugly shame of bleeding into the carrots.

Your right thumb presses against the first two fingers and the knuckles want to crack. They do, a little pop, without you. His habit. Under it comes his father's garage, the same sound, a man telling him to quit it before he ruins his hands. The body is sturdy and a little underslept, shoulders warm from work, a dull bar of tightness low in the back. Twenty-three years old, and a savings account he checks too often and is quietly proud of. A church basement, a coffee urn, a hymn he doesn't believe loudly but sings.

You look at your hands. They are not Dale's, not anyone's you have been. The pale scar through your eyebrow pulls when you frown. You turn the right hand over, then lift your eyes to the window and the wet street.

"Huh," you say, in a voice that is his and not yet yours. "Okay."

Somewhere a wheel is waiting. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be standing at this table when it does.