Paul Guidry

You are in Brian Kozlowski's kitchen in Chicago, and the stove clock says the night is nearly gone. He has been yours four minutes. His scar pulls when you frown. His shoulders are the shoulders of a man who has sat at a desk for fifteen years, and a spreadsheet is open on the laptop in front of you, a column of numbers he would have understood. You do not understand them and you do not want to. You wanted the wheel again before the coffee finished dripping. He is competent and tidy, and he fits you like a coat that was cut for someone's cousin. Four minutes is enough to know what he is for. You have been him in the way you hold a borrowed key. You close the laptop. You open the other page.

The wheel turns. It always lands before you finish deciding.

Couch. Dark room. Blue light moves over your face from a screen, and the remote is loose in your right hand. The show cuts to a bright frame and you sit up straight all at once. You set the remote on the couch arm. There is a half second where you are only a weight on cushions, and then you are the one holding it.

The room is warm and wet. Somewhere past the wall the street is giving off steam, and the air has the sweetness of old wood.

The shirt first. It is a gray T-shirt, soft, washed thin at the collar, and it lies against your back. Through it comes a morning, and the morning is his. He is at the host stand, in a black button-down, doing the cuffs one at a time with a pen clipped in the pocket. The keys go on the belt loop. That is the other life, the work one. This shirt is the one he takes off the minute the door closes. He peels the black one over his head in the hallway and it feels like setting down a tray. He is tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.

Your right hand finds the ring and turns it. You did not tell it to. The band goes round on the knuckle, over and over, and with it comes her voice from the next room. A laugh, a name for him that is only hers. The couch is the couch they bought together the spring after the flood scare. The torn place on the arm is the cat they had before. It is a small, ordinary grief, and it rises in your chest like heat. She is not here tonight. You know it the way you know a stair is missing in the dark.

The sweatpants are heavy cotton. They hold the shape of his knees. A winter, a different one, comes through the waistband: the first January he stopped drinking, his thumbs hooked in this same drawstring, standing in a kitchen at three in the morning, running water into a glass again and again just to hear it. He was proud of that glass and told no one.

The body underneath: a soft middle, thin arms, a lower back that aches in one low coin of pain. His feet are bare on boards that are cool and a little gritty. Forty-three years sit in the joints. His hands know the weight of a stack of menus, the exact twist of a wine key, how to turn a bad table into a good one with one sentence. They are quick. They are kinder than yours.

The show goes on. A man on screen does something foolish and the room waits for you to laugh. Your mouth stays still. Whatever laughed here for years is gone.

You lift your left hand into the light and look at it. A plain band. Gray hair on the wrist. You turn it over, palm up, and close the fingers, and open them.

Then you look up at the dark glass, at the man reflected in it.

"Hello, Paul," you say, and the voice is rough and low and slower than yours.

Somewhere a Chicago kitchen is cooling. Somewhere a coffee is still dripping into a pot for no one. You turn the ring once more and wonder how long this will hold, and when the wanting will start.