Neil Gorecki

The dentist's hands are wrong before you even move them — thick through the knuckle, a beauty mark riding the meat of the thumb, and you stand there in his good bathrobe in his good kitchen in Coastal Maine feeling how little there is to feel. Two minutes. You spun a fat, muscular, green-eyed man who fixes teeth for a living and you already know, standing at his counter with his coffee going cold, that the thrill lasted about as long as the fall does. He has a boat. You don't care about the boat. Somewhere behind his ribs there's a whole life — ex-wives, maybe, a practice, patients who trust that mouth to hurt them gently — and none of it is calling to you. You are twenty-two men deep into this and the twenty-third is already itching, the way the next click of a channel changer itches before the show's even bad yet. You go to the counter where his phone sits, thumb the browser, find vessel.cards already bookmarked in his history like a shameful thing he does before church. You spin.

And you are short. That's the first thing — the floor is closer, your shoulders narrower, and your hand is flat on your own chest, feeling ribs you don't recognize through a shirt buttoned one off. Fluorescent-warm lamp light, a rumpled bed behind you, a tie hanging loose and doubled like two dark tongues against a white shirt. You undo the buttons with fingers that already know the rhythm better than you do — they go back up straight, aligned, the collar sitting the way it's supposed to. The tie knots itself in a four-in-hand your hands have never tied in any of your twenty-three lives, and something in your chest recognizes it the way a song recognizes its own chorus.

The shirt gives it to you first, because you're already inside its sleeves — a Tuesday, dark out, this same bedroom, this same lamp, and a man buttoning up for a 6 AM flight to a conference in Charlotte because Danielle had said just go, Neil, we'll be fine, and he'd stood in this exact spot doing this exact tie feeling like a fraud in his own khakis. Neil Gorecki. The name arrives with the collar settling against his throat. Forty-three years old, and every morning of the last nineteen of them has started in some version of this room, this lamp, this bed with its comforter shoved to one side because Danielle sleeps hot and he sleeps cold and they've never resolved it, just adjusted, the way you adjust to a nose broken at fourteen by a baseball that should've been caught and instead caved the bridge in sideways so it healed crooked and everyone at the office calls it character.

The wedding band is next — plain, warm already from his own hand, and it opens on a church parking lot in July, humidity like a wet towel over the whole world, Danielle in her mother's dress altered twice, and him sweating through a rented tux collar thinking he would never be this happy again and being wrong, being wrong in the good direction, for years. A daughter comes with it — not an image so much as a weight, a height marked in pencil on a doorframe somewhere in this house, a school play he cried at and pretended he didn't. His hands, doing this tie, know the difference between his daughter's hair and his wife's from memory alone; that's not something the wheel gave you, that's something his fingers kept.

His body is unspectacular and that's its own kind of comfort — five-seven, the gut just starting to soften around a belt loop, blood pressure medication in the cabinet he takes every morning without thinking of it as anything, a low dull hum behind the sternum he's stopped noticing the way you stop noticing a hum in an old refrigerator. No aches beyond the ordinary. Legs that know the walk from bed to closet to bathroom without needing light. Hands that have entered numbers into two monitors for so many years that a keyboard under them is more natural than air — and under that, quieter, church on Sundays, a mumbled grace before dinner that Danielle says louder than he does, an usher's polo shirt hung in this same closet for the 9 AM service, a faith worn the way the wedding band is worn: plain, load-bearing, unremarked on.

The socks are still on his feet — you feel that, absurdly, before the shoes — and through them, carpet gone thin in a path from bed to door, walked so many thousand mornings it's worn a story into the fibers. Coffee smell starting somewhere past the door. A house that is not fancy and not humble either, paid for slowly and correctly, the way everything about this man was built: no flourish, no ex he'd cross a street to avoid, no secret in the walls worth the word secret. Just a marriage that mostly works, a job that mostly bores him, a daughter he'd set fire to the house for.

You look down. The hands at the ends of your borrowed arms are square, plain, a little soft, the wedding band catching the lamp. You turn one over like it might tell you something the shirt didn't. Then you look up — into the mirror over the dresser, into the version of his face that hasn't caught up to what just happened to it — and you say, quiet, mostly to see if the voice is his:

"Almost forgot the tie."

You haven't decided anything yet. You never do, this early.