Paul Wozniak

You are standing in Hector Salinas, in a kitchen in Houston, and it is the middle of a Tuesday morning. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you know he is not enough. The gap in his front teeth is under your tongue. The goatee itches. You came to the site on his phone, with his thumb, and the thumb is still on the screen. You do not know what you wanted from him. Maybe nothing he could have given. You pay, you spin, and Hector goes out like a pilot light.

The razor is moving again.

It goes up the jaw against the grain. Your arm does it, and the corner of the mouth passes under the blade without a flinch. Cold porcelain is under your left palm. Foam is on half your face, and there is a clean smooth place where the blade has been. You are bent over a sink in a small white bathroom. The window behind you is all pale winter. Somewhere outside, a train goes over steel, and the whole room hums with it.

Your back is bowed over the basin, and a low ache sits in it that is forty-one years old. The belly rests against the sink's edge. You are short. The mirror is hung for a taller man, or for a wife, and you have to lean to meet it.

The shirt is the first thing to talk. Navy cotton, washed soft, loose at the belly. A flash comes up in his feeling and not yours: a hallway dark at five in the morning, a daughter's door open a crack, and his own hand pulling this shirt off a hook so the hangers would not clink. Do not wake them. The cuffs of his uniform are in the bag by the door, because tonight he works the desk. He shaves now because the night is long and a clean jaw makes him feel awake. Today he is leaving late. He is a man who sleeps in the wrong hours of the day and keeps his family's hours in his head like a second watch.

The razor handle is thin and plastic and warm. His fingers know the grip. Under it is a memory of a Sunday, his father showing him this exact angle with a dull blade at a sink in a different house. Chin up, Paulie. Don't fight it. It is not your father. It is his.

Your thumbnail is chewed to the quick. You notice it on the razor handle, the short raw edge of it, and under that you feel the habit, the small private relief of teeth on a nail in a quiet booth at three in the morning, watching a lobby camera show nobody. You taste, faintly, a ghost of cigarettes he gave up. Eleven years. The wanting is still a room in him, and you stand in the doorway of it. A drink too, one he decided against, and a church folding chair, and a pastor's hand on his shoulder, and a gratitude so plain it embarrasses you.

The left hand on the sink wears a ring. The band is thin and warm, and it has worn a groove. When you touch it with your thumb the whole marriage opens: Sarah laughing at a kitchen table with her shoes off, a hospital corridor, the weight of a newborn in the crook of an arm, then a second one. A little money in an account, careful, counted. He counts it on bad nights. Enough, almost.

Under the sleeve on the right forearm the letters are inked in script. You do not read them yet. Your skin knows them.

You set the razor down on the porcelain. You turn your hand over. The nail is bitten. The ring is dull gold. The foam on your cheek is drying tight. You lift your eyes to the mirror, to the blue ones in it, and you say, quietly, so no one in the apartment wakes:

"Okay, Paul. Let's see how long."

The train passes. You are still holding the sink. Somewhere, you can already feel it, the wanting is turning over in its sleep.