Martin Kowalski

The man I am has been Lonnie Whitecotton for less than a minute, and already I am tired of his shoulders. I am standing in a gravel lot with a hard hat in my hand and the Texas morning coming down white on the back of my neck. The crew is hauling rebar behind me. Someone calls the name, Lonnie, and I do not turn, because it is not mine and because I have noticed a thing about this body I did not want to know. It is slow. It is a big, patient, freckled slab of a man, and everything I reach for arrives a half second late. I wanted something quicker. I wanted a man who would make a different sound when he spoke. So I take out the phone with his cracked thumb, and the wheel is already there, turning, and I pay.

Then there is water running, and a mouth full of mint.

The brushing stops mid-stroke. My arm is up, bent, the elbow cold in the air, a toothbrush in my fist and foam on my lip. Tap running. Tile under bare feet, cold and gritty. I start again on the other side, slower, working the back molars, because they ask to be worked. My tongue finds a gold canine and I almost laugh.

I rinse twice. The sink is old porcelain, and my left hand holds its edge. It trembles, a fine steady shiver I did not order, and the ring on it clicks once against the rim.

The T-shirt hangs soft and thin on my belly. It is grey from a hundred washes, and when I pull it straight a memory comes up through the cotton. It is his, not mine: a Saturday, a small girl asleep on this chest, drool going warm through the fabric, and a contentment so plain it hurts. Then the drawstring pants. His wife bought them. A morning: she tosses them at him from the bed, says something about his legs being cold, and he loves her in a tired, ordinary way. There is another woman in the pocket of that feeling, newer, ended, and it sits in him like a swallowed stone. I do not know her name. I only know where it lies.

The brush handle is worn. Through it comes the night shift: the school corridor, floors gone amber under the emergency lights, the buffer humming, keys on his hip swinging against his thigh like a slow clock. The mop wringer's bar in his palms. His back aches, low, on the right. His knees complain on the stairs. He is thirty-nine and he is behind on everything, and the number comes up with the radiator's knock: underwater, the debt a weight he carries evenly, like groceries. He does not drink. He never wanted to. The hands shake anyway, in the dark, and he has told no one.

The radiator ticks. Somewhere past the door a child coughs, and his whole body turns toward the sound before I have decided anything.

I stand the brush up, bristles to the ceiling, out of the grey water cup it has always sat in. Then I turn my hand over. The wedding band, the tremor, the knuckles pale and broad.

I look up into the mirror at the receding hairline, the smooth jaw, the brown eyes waiting, and I let the gold tooth show.

"Morning," I say, and his voice is lower than I thought.

How long, I wonder. Until the wanting comes back. Until tomorrow, or until the water stops running.