Luis Medeiros

Walter Gillespie's jaw is rough under your thumb, and it is the roughness that decides it. Nothing is wrong with him. He is fifty-eight, his knees are fine, and the funeral home is quiet. A woman in a gray coat has just signed for her husband's ashes, and you stood there behind his folded hands and felt exactly nothing. You were thinking of the wheel the whole time, the way you think of a drawer you keep opening. You close the office door and pay.

The wheel turns, and there is no sound in it.

Then the cold is on your face. Foam, wet and sharp with menthol, covers half your jaw. A razor is stopped against the bone, and the tile is hard under your shoes. Your leg is bouncing, a small steady tremor from the hip, and you did not start it. The window is white with sea light. Your left hand is flat on the cold porcelain of the sink, and there is a ring on it.

You move the razor. It goes up the jaw against the grain, past the corner of your mouth without stopping, and the hair gives way clean. Your hand knows something about that corner. It does not know why it's allowed to skip it now.

The flannel is soft at the elbows, worn thin there. It gives you a morning: a closet door that sticks, and his wife saying *wear the green one, it's cold*, and him wearing the plaid anyway because it was hers to complain about. He buttoned it from the bottom up, left cuff first, and the ring clicked on a button. Then you feel the tan work pants, stiff at the knee. A different morning comes with them, years of mornings in a dark blue uniform, a steering wheel as wide as a table, the air brakes sighing at the end of the line. The tie got knotted in the mirror at the depot because he never trusted himself to do it at home. A kid once told him he looked like a policeman, and he kept the badge polished for a month because of it.

The sink edge is under your palm. Cold comes up through it, and with it comes a night in this bathroom: a daughter, small, sitting on the closed lid and watching him shave, asking why it hurt. He said it didn't, and he lied. Her feet swung. There was a second child too, a boy, who later learned to do it on his own and did it badly. The ache that arrives is warm and wide and it is not yours. You hold it anyway, like a stolen coat.

There is money somewhere in him, quiet money. A paid-off house gone silver in the weather, traps stacked in the dooryard, a number in an account he checks twice a year and tells no one about. A big night once a month, a few beers with a man named Teo. No cigarettes, ever. Something like prayer on the water, with no church in it. Your back is a little stiff and your shoulders are strong. Your fifty-seven years sit in them like sand in a boot.

You finish the other cheek. Freckles come up out of the foam across the nose, plain and brown. You rinse the blade and tap it twice on the faucet, which is his habit and not yours.

You lift your hand off the sink and turn it over in the window light. The ring catches. The palm is broad and callused where a wheel has worn it. You look up into the glass, past the foam, at hazel eyes you have never seen before.

"Hello, Luis," you say. Your voice comes out lower than you expected.

Behind you the leg keeps bouncing. How long, you wonder. Until supper, or until you want again. You don't know yet.