Peter Lanigan

You are standing in a hallway with a mop bucket, and the janitor you are wearing has a bad left knee. It has been telling you so for forty minutes. The nose, once broken, whistles on every inhale. The beard is damp at the corners from the coffee you did not know he took with so much sugar. Curtis Hembree has been yours for less than a minute of wall-clock time, and somehow it has been long enough.

That is the reason, and you would never say it aloud. The school floor is waxed to a shine, a child's drawing of a horse is taped to the wall, and the knee hurts, and none of it is wrong. It is only that it is already finished. You know where the keys are. You know the mop. You have nothing left to ask this man, so you leave the bucket where it stands, open the page with the wheel on it, pay, and spin.

Then you are driving.

The dark comes up first, a highway with no light on it, and the dash glow lying green on your knuckles. Hands at ten and two. The car has drifted a foot toward the line, and you pull it back in one smooth motion, because the arms know how. Both hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider. You do not decide it. Your thumb finds the stalk and the signal ticks on for an exit that is not his. You do not know why you chose it.

The fleece is against your throat, zipped up to the chin. The fabric is soft and a little pilled. You touch the cuff, and the memory comes in his feeling, not yours. It is five in the morning in a brownstone kitchen. A wife is asleep upstairs, and he is standing in the dark trying not to wake her. He pulls the plaid shirt off a hanger, the left sleeve first, because the left shoulder stiffens in the cold. He buttons it wrong and then right. The navy trousers are the ones she says make him look like a crossing guard. He loves that she says it.

The wheel is hard and cold under your palm, and the leather has worn smooth where his thumbs rest. That opens a second thing. A girl's voice, not his wife's, saying his name on a stairwell, and the sick sweetness of that, and the way he drove home afterward with the windows down so nothing would smell of her. She is the recent one. He ended it in a parking garage, crying more than she did. He has told no one, and he confessed it to a priest in a language so careful it said nothing. The memory sits in your chest like a swallowed stone.

You lift a hand and the nail of your thumb is bitten to the quick. Your teeth are already at it. The habit is his, older than the marriage. He is a dentist, and he has spent thirty years telling other people to stop doing exactly this.

Under you, the seat is a long hollow his body has made. The belly rests against the belt. The back aches low and dull, a drill-chair ache, from years of leaning over open mouths. Your jaw is smooth, freshly shaved that morning. When your mouth moves, the dimples come, though nothing is funny. Two children are asleep somewhere, and the road smells of rain and old tobacco, a ghost of the years he quit.

Then you look at your hands. The left carries the plain gold band, and you turn it slowly under the dash light. The hand is broad and warm, and it is not yours, and it is yours.

You lift your eyes and say, quietly, to the dark windshield, "Well. Hello, Peter."

The exit sign slides toward you, green and wet. You wonder how long the wanting will stay quiet this time.