Mike Odenkirk

You're crouched on a Seattle roof at eleven in the morning that isn't yours, soot in a throat that isn't yours either, and the wanting hits before the job even finishes. Colin Presnell's arms are wiry and quick and they ache in ways you haven't earned, and somewhere down in the house a client's dog won't stop barking at the ladder, and you think: four minutes, and already this. The dimples, the green eyes, the skinny kid's body that took the stairs two at a time an hour ago — none of it is worth the itch behind your ribs, which was never about Colin at all. It's the wheel itself. It's the door in the laptop screen glowing on a table you don't own, in a bedroom that isn't yours, at nearly midnight, everyone in this house asleep except you, wearing somebody else's exhaustion like a coat that fits wrong. You climb down off the roof he'll never remember climbing. You go to the screen. You spin.

The room you land in is beige and small and smells of soap and toothpaste and something floral gone stale in a bottle. Fluorescent light over a mirror. A man's face — not yours, not Colin's — leaning into it, mouth pulled sideways, razor scraping up along a jawline through white foam, and the stroke that was hesitating at the corner of his mouth a half-second ago suddenly isn't hesitating anymore. It finishes fast and sure, up against the grain, no waver at all, because you are the one steering it now and you don't know yet where his caution lives.

The razor stops. The hand holding it is broader than Colin's, older, a scar of a callus riding the base of the thumb from years of pliers and knurled screwdriver handles. You feel the weight of this body settle into you all at once — sturdier, heavier through the middle, forty years sitting in the knees and the low back in a way that has its own dull permanent hum, cholesterol pills probably still in the cabinet behind that mirror, a memory that surfaces without your asking: a doctor saying *nothing dramatic, Mike, just watch the eggs.*

The boxers you're standing in — white, soft with washing — bring something with them: a woman's hands folding laundry on a bed, humming, a ring on the dresser catching lamplight. Not marriage. Not yet, or not exactly — you feel the arrangement of it, a name that isn't spoken but is *there*, someone he built a whole shared kitchen with, three kids' worth of backpacks by the door, one of them still in a car seat and two much bigger, gangly, loud at breakfast. And underneath that, quieter, another name — an ex, years gone, whose photograph he does not have and does not need, because some mornings shaving he still, absurdly, thinks of her mouth saying his name a particular way, and is a little ashamed of it, and shaves faster.

The sink under your palm gives you the routine: the alarm at four-forty, the drive to a job site off I-285 where the ceiling's half open and conduit runs overhead like ribs, the walk-through with the foreman, the toothpick he keeps in his shirt pocket out of habit from quitting cigarettes eleven years back, chewed to a splinter by lunch. The shirt isn't on yet — it's hung on the door hook, navy, soft cotton gone thin at the elbows, a laminated name tag that says MIKE stitched crooked because he sewed it on himself after the first one fell off in a crawlspace. Just touching the collar with your eyes brings the whole morning ritual: the shirt over one shoulder then the other, the tool belt heavy and familiar riding his hip before he's even dressed the rest of the way, pliers, red-handled, cool from the closet.

There's a whole life in the tile under his sock feet — years of this house, a mortgage he complains about at parties, a lawn he lets go too long in July, the smell of a suburb in the kind of heat that sits on your chest before six a.m. He is spiritual in the way a man is who has fixed enough houses to believe something holds them up besides code — not church, just a feeling on the roofline some mornings. He drinks two beers at cookouts and calls it a night. None of this is dramatic. That's the whole shape of him: an ordinary Friday, an ordinary jaw, foam going dry at the collarbone.

You look down. Thick fingers, the razor still between them, a nick of foam under the thumbnail. You turn the hand over slow, like it might tell you something the mirror hasn't.

"There he is," you say to the reflection, and you don't mean Mike.