Raymond Kettering

Gary Pelnick's apartment smells like instant coffee gone cold and a radiator that ticks. You have been him for six minutes, standing at the kitchen counter in his robe because that is where his phone was charging, and already the taste of his life is coming up through his teeth like something spoiled. A teacher's aide. Fifty years old. A body that carries its weight in the wrong places, soft over soft, knees that complain going down the porch steps — you know this because some idiot muscle memory keeps trying to sit into a chair that isn't there. He alphabetizes his spice rack. He has a photo of a dead dog on the fridge held up by a magnet shaped like Ohio. None of it is yours and none of it interests you, and six minutes was long enough to know you do not want the rest of whatever tonight was going to be, some rerun playing to nobody, some bowl of cereal eaten standing up. You open the laptop still open on his table, the wheel already loaded from an hour ago like a held breath, and you do not hesitate over it, because hesitating is for people who still have somewhere else they'd rather be. You spin.

The scroll keeps going a half second after it should have stopped — his thumb, then yours, no seam between them that anyone could point to. You are on your side in the dark. There is a phone six inches off your nose, warm along one edge from being held too long, and a pillow smelling faintly of somebody else's shampoo, and weight all down your left side where a body has been lying still for the better part of an hour, elbow gone dead, ankle hooked over ankle. Somewhere behind you a window holds a streetlamp like a low orange moon. The scrolling thumb is yours now and it is quicker than his was, more certain, flicking through the very same feed he'd stalled on — an ad, a dog, a headline about the Eagles — none of it holding you the way it held him, because none of it is yours to hold onto yet.

It comes in through the phone first, stupidly, the way these things always start stupid — the weight and heat of it in your palm, the specific worn slickness of a case he bought at a kiosk in the airport three years ago and never replaced. A flash: him buying it, hungover, flying home from a plant conference in Charlotte, laughing at nothing with a man named Petrocelli who does not work there anymore. Then the mattress under you gives you more — its give particular to a body that sleeps alone and has for four years, no dip worn into a second pillow anymore, though the second pillow is still there, still fluffed, because he cannot quite bring himself to take it off the bed. Marie's name arrives with that pillow, unbidden, the whole shape of a marriage that ran fifteen years and ended without either of them doing anything so dramatic as leaving — it just got quiet, and then quieter, and then she was living in Roxborough with a hygienist named Todd and Ray — you — this body's Ray — was signing papers at a diner because it felt less final than a lawyer's office.

Your beard is against the pillowcase and that gives you something else, older, deeper — his hands, pulling at it without thinking, the way they always do when a supervisor's on the floor asking why line four is down again, or when the diocese newsletter comes and he skims the obituaries first out of habit, Catholic to the bone in the way you only are when you stopped really believing sometime in your thirties and never told anyone. The earlobe with its small hoop remembers a night in his twenties he still can't fully account for and a mother who didn't speak to him for a month over it.

The shirt is not on him now — he's in the plaid you can feel gathered at the elbow, worn soft as a dishrag — but it arrives anyway through his hands, which know it by feel alone: the gray-blue chambray hanging on the closet door for tomorrow's shift, sleeve rolled the way he always rolls it, pen already clipped in the pocket because he forgets otherwise. He put it on a thousand mornings the same way — right arm, left arm, shoulder-check in a mirror that's losing its silver at the corner, glasses on before the hard hat because otherwise he loses ten minutes looking for them on the catwalk. Forty-two years old and the body still does the job without asking: shoulders that carry a clipboard and a radio without complaint, a back that's fine as long as he doesn't twist wrong lifting the gate at the loading dock, feet that ache by three but not before. Average, all through. Unremarkable, except that it is warm and it is breathing and an hour ago it belonged entirely to somebody who is now nowhere at all.

There's a drink most nights, one, sometimes a second poured smaller than the first, alone at the kitchen table with the radio low, and there's no cigarette ever, not once, some old promise to a father with a hole in his throat at the end. There's a production line under him most days, humming, and men who call him Ray and mean it kindly. There's a life that isn't much and was, until an hour ago, entirely his.

You lift the hand off the phone and hold it up in the blue light, turning it, watching the calluses catch the glow, the silver ring of hair on the knuckle, a stranger's hand doing exactly what you tell it.

"Okay," you say to the empty room, low, almost gentle, like you're breaking it to him. "Let's see what you're worth, Ray."