Roy Combess

Douglas Ferriter's office smells like recycled air and cold coffee, and you have been him for three minutes, which is not long enough to want anything except what you already wanted before you sat down in his chair. His tie is still knotted too tight from a meeting that ended forty minutes ago. His knees ache in a way that isn't yours — gout, maybe, or just sixty-two years of San Francisco stairs — and his phone is lit up with a name you don't recognize and don't care to. This is the forty-third body and it is Friday afternoon and the light through the window is doing that flat gold thing it does before the fog comes back in, and none of it matters, because the thing about Douglas is that he is *fine*. Comfortable. Correct. And three minutes into being him you already know that comfortable is the one flavor you can't sit with anymore. You didn't spin the wheel forty-three times to end up somewhere quiet. You open the laptop, you find vessel.cards already bookmarked — of course it is, you did that, some version of you — and you pay, and you spin, already leaving before you land anywhere.

The pan is warm under your right hand and the wooden spoon is turning through something with chicken in it, and you are mid-stroke when you arrive, so the stroke keeps going a half-beat on its own before you catch it, stop, and drag it backward through the pan the other way, against the grain of what he'd built. Salt falls from your left hand without your permission — his hand, his habit, already moving — three fingers pinching from a box by the stove. You do not taste it. Something older than you, some reflex sitting in the meat of this arm, reaches into the cabinet above the stove and takes down a second plate, white, chipped at the rim, and sets it down next to the first one on the counter, and you stand there with two plates and one pan and no idea yet why that felt necessary.

The shirt is what opens first — pale blue, buttoned to the throat this morning by hands that knew the motion without watching it, and it comes back in the ordinary poetry of a man getting dressed for a job he's had eleven years: standing in front of a dresser missing one pull, breath still tasting like coffee, the tie already looped and hung on the closet door from the night before because he lays out Fridays special, Fridays he lets himself feel like the day matters even though the store opens the same as any other. Store manager. Regional loves him, mostly, in the vague underpaying way regionals love anybody reliable. This morning — his morning, hours behind wherever you'd been sitting in Douglas's chair — the alarm went at four-forty and he was on the floor by five-thirty, pallets stacked in the center aisle like a wall he had to take apart before the doors opened, box cutter in his back pocket, the plastic wrap crackling off in long sheets, dust catching gold in the light from the high windows. His knees know that concrete floor. His lower back knows it more.

The keys on his belt loop swing against your hip and give you the ring of them — the store's back door, the office, the cage where they keep the good tools, and one small brass one that doesn't open anything here, that he's carried nine years since the house on Sourwood Branch stopped being his to lock. That key comes with the whole marriage folded into it, quick and complete: a woman named Denise who left dishes half-washed out of spite and love in equal measure, who is somebody else's now, amicably, mostly, and a daughter — grown, gone to Lexington, calls on Sundays whether or not he answers. The girlfriend is newer, four months, her name rising up warm through the goatee your fingers itch to touch — Angela, who laughs too loud in restaurants and doesn't mind that he can't cook anything that isn't skillet food, who was supposed to come over tonight, which is why there are two plates and why some reflex older than this moment reached up and took the second one down before you'd caught up to your own hands.

But there's a third thing under that, quieter, the kind of thing that doesn't come from the shirt but from the pan itself, the smell of it — his last girlfriend, Terra, gone eight months now, who used to stand at this exact stove with him some evenings, hip against the counter, stealing bites off the spoon before he called it done. Some nights, cooking alone, his hand still turns the spoon the way it turned when she was here, without asking him first. That's whose absence just made him reset the stir the other direction, some old groove in an arm that belonged, for a while, to somebody who isn't coming to dinner and never will again — a habit grieving on its own schedule, underneath him, without his permission.

The body is thin in the way of a man who works standing up and eats standing up too, and his lower back complains the second you settle full weight into both feet, a low ten-year ache from bending over pallets. The nose — you feel where it sits crooked before you ever see it, a old fracture healed slightly wrong, and something in it, distantly, remembers getting hit, though not by what. His knuckles want cracking; they always do, a tic worn so deep it isn't even nervous anymore, just weather.

You look down at your hands — his hands, spoon still in the right one, salt ghosting his fingertips in the left — and you turn them over slow in the stove light like you're checking they're real, like some part of you expects Douglas's soft manicured knuckles instead of this — cracked, sun-spotted, a callus riding the base of the thumb from box cutters and pallet jacks.

You look up, past the window, toward the dark coming down early behind the ridge, and you say, out loud, to no one who can hear you, in a voice that isn't yours yet but will answer to your want easy enough:

"Guess it's just me again."