Michael Brennan

You are standing in Paul Nakamura's kitchen in Dallas, the cab of his truck still in his shoulders, and the coffee has gone cold in his hand because you forgot it. Forty-eight years of knees and a lower back that ticks when he bends. Sun on the table. His phone, face down, has rung twice, and you let it. Someone from the yard, wanting to know why he is late. He is not late. He is nowhere. He is standing here deciding.

It is nothing he did. He is a decent body. The dimples work, the hands are steady, the gray at the temples reads as trustworthy to every stranger. But an hour ago his sister called, and she said his name, the short one, the one only she used, and your whole chest answered to it. It was the answering that frightened you. Something in him had a claim on the sound and you were only borrowing the mouth. You put the cup down. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then there is cold porcelain under your left palm, and the edge of a sink against your belly, and your right hand is up at your jaw with a razor stopped against the skin.

Foam. Mint and tin. A radiator knocking somewhere behind you. Daylight comes through a tall window, white and tired, and in the mirror there is a bald man with half his face buried in white and the other half gray stubble, hazel eyes, freckles across the nose and cheeks like something spilled. He is heavy and he is breathing like it. His right leg is bouncing against the cabinet. You did not tell it to. It has been going since before you came.

You do not lower the razor. The sink is chipped under your thumb, a small rough bite in the enamel, and it opens: a girl of seven, standing on the closed toilet lid to watch him do this, her finger in the foam, laughing, and a warmth so large and so sore that you nearly put the blade down. His daughter. Her mother's name rises behind it and stays just out of reach, a woman in a doorway, a long argument, a good year before it.

Your hip is against the cabinet and the green cotton of the shirt clings at your back with sweat, and the shirt gives you a morning: his arms going into the sleeves in the dark, the cuffs of the jeans dragged over the heels, a belt he does not need to look at. Keys. They hang from the belt loop and knock against your thigh, and they hand you a school hallway after everyone is gone, the floor wax smell, the long rattle of a cart, the quiet he loves and tells nobody about, the way he stops outside a particular classroom and just listens to it be empty. A little money put away. A savings book he checks the way other men check a wound. The brown shoes pinch at the left little toe. The knees are not good. The shoulders are strong in a way that has nothing to do with the gym.

Spiritual, he would say, if pressed. He talks to something in the stairwell at night. It has never answered and he has never minded.

The razor is cold. Under the jaw the skin pulls tight, and your hand already knows the next stroke. It goes up the jaw against the grain, and at the corner of the mouth, where he always slows, where the memory says *careful, you cut yourself here, you always cut yourself here*, you do not slow. The blade goes through clean. The second half takes half the time of the first.

Rinse. The water is cold on his face, and you straighten with your own breath loud in the tiled room, rinsed pink, and look at your hand. Thick fingers, calloused at the pads, freckled across the back. Nicks of old work. You turn it over. The palm is creased and warm, and you flex it, and it obeys.

You lift your eyes to the mirror, to the hazel ones, and say in his low, rough voice, "Okay. Hi."

The leg is still bouncing. You do not know how long he stays. You do not know when the wanting comes back.