Patrick Selwyn

Terrence's kitchen smells like a fryer that isn't even on, that smell baked so deep into the exhaust fan it never leaves. Five fifty in the morning, San Francisco, and you are standing at his counter in his skinny-fat body, feeling the ache already starting behind his knees before the shift has even begun, and you know — the way you always know now — that you are done with him. Not angry done. Just done the way you're done with a bar when the music stops being any good. Fifty-five years in these bones and none of them are interesting once you've worn all of them yourself for a minute. You open the site on his cracked phone screen with his thick fingers. The wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, which is a lie you tell yourself every time.

It stops.

And you are tall. That's the first thing, the sudden distance from the ground, and the second thing is the cold — real cold, wet-street cold — against a jaw that has stubble on it, and the third thing is the shoe. Your left foot is a half-inch off true, dragging, mid-scuff, and then it isn't; it lands flat and quiet like it was always going to. Streetlight varnishes the wet asphalt orange. A parked Subaru is warm and solid under your right hand where you caught yourself a second ago, in a life that isn't running anymore. You are six-four in this one. You feel that first, before you feel anything else — the sheer altitude of it — and your knees answer with a dull, familiar complaint that isn't yours yet but is about to be.

The jacket is open. Canvas, quilted lining, a collar that smells like cigarettes and cedar aftershave and, underneath both, a woman's shampoo that hasn't been near this jacket in hours but has left something of itself anyway. That smell alone drops a name into you before you've asked for it: Priya. Not the wife. The wife's name arrives a half-second later, gentler, worn-in — Meghan — but Priya comes first and hot, the ex who still has a hook in him somewhere under the ribs, eleven years gone and still capable of making him order one more drink at closing.

Your hand finds a lighter in the jacket pocket without being told to. It's brass, dented on one corner, and your thumb rolls the wheel before you've decided to, an old animal motion, and that single spark of static is enough to let a whole night come pouring back — the bar, the buddies from the union hall, the second whiskey he told himself he wouldn't have, the toast to nothing in particular, someone's birthday that was three days off but who's counting. Under the jacket a flannel, and under that a t-shirt gone soft from a hundred washes, and the memory of putting all three on arrives sleeve by sleeve, in his hands and not yours: the flannel's second button always sticking, the little curse he says every single time it does, done automatic, done married-twelve-years automatic. The wedding band is cold on your ring finger and it brings the wedding itself, briefly, gauzy — garlands, his mother crying with joy she wouldn't explain, Meghan's sister translating the mantras for the groomsmen who didn't understand a word and didn't need to.

Your back tells you its own story, low and constant, an old workingman's ache that lives beneath the shoulder blades and down into the left hip, thirty-seven years old and already carrying the bill for kneeling under two hundred sinks a year. Your hands know things you haven't asked them to know: the specific give of a slip-joint wrench, the exact pressure before a fitting cross-threads, and they know this lighter best of all, turning it over and over now against your palm out of habit while the rest of the street stays quiet and closed and two in the morning around you.

Somewhere in the flannel's collar there's a smell of a child's shampoo — a car seat, a small hand gripping a huge finger, a name that surfaces soft and complete: Anjali, five years old, asleep right now in a bungalow with the mountains behind it, blind to what her father is at this exact moment, which is nothing at all, which is empty, which is you.

You stop at the corner. The one that isn't the way home. You don't know yet that it isn't, and some small drowned part of him, dissolving, might have known and tried to turn you back — but there's nothing left in there to try.

You look down at the hand holding the lighter. Freckled, big-knuckled, faint tan line where the band sits. You turn it over once, like checking it's real.

"Long night," you say to no one, in his voice, and it fits your mouth like it was always yours, and somewhere down under the wanting there's already the itch of the wheel, quiet, patient, not today maybe, not this hour — but there.