Roger Ambrose

Seven minutes is nothing. Seven minutes is a sunrise not even finished happening, and already you know this one is a mistake — Efrain Bautista, 37, kind eyes going soft in a mirror you haven't earned, freckles you keep noticing like they belong to someone else because they do. His apartment smells like a stranger's detergent. There's a Bible on the nightstand with his handwriting crowding the margins, decades of some other man's certainty, and it itches at you worse than any debt ever did. You didn't take him for this — the sermons, the quiet, the youth group photos taped to the fridge with kids' names written under each face in marker. You took him because the wheel gave him to you and you were already reaching for the site again before his knees had finished bending into his own posture. Boredom wearing a good man's skin is still boredom. You open the laptop still standing, still barefoot on his cheap carpet, and you spin before the coffee maker behind you even finishes its click.

The lobby comes up around you mid-motion — hotel carpet, patterned rust-and-gold, the smell of drip coffee and something floral in the AC. Your hand is already closing on a paper cup and it closes wrong, fingers too eager, cup crumpling half an inch under its own lid before you catch it, correct it, set it dead level on the little café table like it never happened. Ten more motions come out of you checked — a phone squared to a newspaper's edge, a lanyard straightened though it was never crooked, a step retaken an inch to the left for no reason at all. Somewhere behind your sternum a body settles into itself, wide through the shoulders, heavier than the one you left, and none of it asks your permission.

The shirt is what opens first. Cotton, soft with washing, tucked into a waistband that has given up letting the belt do all the work — and with it comes a bedroom in gray Atlanta morning-light, a woman's hand smoothing this same collar down flat before he'd even finished buttoning it, saying *you'll be back before I'm off work, right,* not really a question, both of them knowing the answer was maybe. Nineteen years of that maybe. Nineteen years of hotel lobbies in six states and a marriage that never once needed saving because neither of you ever let it get that far gone — just far enough that homecomings still meant something, that her voice on the phone at night still did something to your chest that had a name once and doesn't need one now.

The lanyard against your collarbone gives you the account — Southeast territory, sixteen years, a name badge redone so many times you stopped reading your own title on it. The tie you're not wearing today, loosened by choice, gives you the freedom of having earned that much informality. The wedding band is cold for half a second and then isn't, and it brings the ring itself — a Tuesday at a jeweler's counter in a mall that doesn't exist anymore, her laughing at something the salesman said, you not remembering what because you were looking at her hand instead of his face.

The coffee cup, warm through the cardboard sleeve, brings this morning specifically — the hotel room's bad light, the tie chosen and rejected twice, the shirt this one, blue, because she likes you in blue though she isn't here to see it, hasn't been on a trip in six years, sends a text instead: *knock 'em dead, don't eat gas station lunch again.* You didn't. You had a granola bar in the car and told her it was a sandwich.

Under the suit jacket your shoulders carry old weight room muscle going soft the honest way, at your own pace, on your own schedule — a body that still knows how to carry boxes of samples up three flights when the elevator's out, that still does the push-ups some mornings out of habit more than vanity. Forty-six years old and none of it hurts yet except the left knee on stairs, and the debt sits somewhere behind the ribs like a stone you've learned to breathe around — the number that never got smaller no matter how many quotas got hit, a second mortgage nobody talks about at dinner, a faith that says patience is owed to you by nobody and you owe it anyway. Five prayers a day even in hotel bathrooms with the fan running so the framed watercolor on the wall doesn't have to watch. No drink, ever, not even at the conferences where it's the whole point. No cigarettes, though the stress has asked more than once.

You look down. The cup is dented where your grip overcorrected. The ring catches the light off the window glass, and beyond it the street outside is doing its ordinary Atlanta afternoon — cars, a bus hissing at the curb, nothing about to happen to anyone.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, testing the voice like it's a coat that might not fit. It fits. It's a good voice. Low, worn a little smooth at the edges from thirty years of talking strangers into signatures.

You don't know how long you get to keep it.