Russell Deptula

Four hundred dollars a day, Caleb Renstrom billed, and you had been him for a hundred and twenty seconds and already knew the number was a lie somebody told a landlord. Denver at three in the morning, standing in a kitchen you don't remember walking into, a glass of water sweating on the counter, and your own — his own — mouth tasting of someone else's cheap scotch. The gap in his front teeth. The stubble that would never grow in even. You'd spun for *this*, for a man who whistles through his teeth when he thinks, who has a .38 in a drawer he's never fired outside a range, who left a wife in Aurora he still calls on her birthday out of guilt, not love. Two minutes and the whole shape of him had already closed around you like a coat that fit someone else's shoulders. Boredom isn't even the word. It's more like hunger arriving on a schedule. You set the glass down with his scarred, ugly hand and you think: not this one, not tonight, and you go back to the page with the wheel on it, the one that's never once asked you to explain yourself, and you pay, and you spin.

The breath changes first. Ragged, then even, like a held thing let go. An arm that was hanging off a mattress draws itself up and folds across a chest that is not Caleb's — softer, broader, a gut under a black t-shirt, hands that are a stranger's thickness in your sense of them. Streetlight through a gap in heavy curtains. A smell of fabric softener and somebody else's sweat. The body rolls onto its back on its own, decisively, like it has somewhere to be, though it is the deep dead middle of a Thursday night and the room says sleep, sleep, nothing but sleep.

It comes in through the sheets first — cheap cotton, a looseness in the weave his thumb would know blind — and that's the first flash: not a scene, just a feeling, *mine, ours, hers and mine*, the comfort of a bed shared a long time. Then the wedding band on the left hand, and that's where it opens up, wide and sudden: a courthouse in Van Nuys twenty-six years ago, a woman named Denise in a yellow dress because she said white felt like a lie the second time around for her too, and a ring he has never once taken off, not to wash dishes, not to sleep, not through three fights that nearly ended it and one that actually should have. You feel the groove it's worn into the finger, how the hand doesn't register it as separate from itself anymore.

The tattoos on the arm come next, pressed into the mattress and then not — a name, Denise, and a date under it, inked nine years into the marriage on an anniversary neither of them could afford to celebrate any other way, done at a shop on Sunset by a kid half his age who kept calling him "boss." Script lettering. A little crooked where the kid's hand had shaken on the final curl, which he never minded, which he liked, actually — proof a real person did it. And below it, smaller, another date, no name, one he doesn't let his mind touch too long even now, even asleep, even possessed — a year, a woman who was not Denise, somebody from before, the one who still shows up sometimes in a dream that isn't really about her anymore so much as about being twenty-eight and thinking he had time.

The jaw works — clenches, releases, clenches — an old tic that isn't yours, that arrived with the body like a habit sewn into the muscle, and through it comes the job: a checkout lane, the belt running, the particular ache that lives between his shoulder blades by hour four, the scanner's weight in his palm so familiar his hand forms around the memory of it even here, empty, in bed. Customers who call him "sir" and customers who don't look at him at all. The mole high on his cheek that a little girl in line once pointed at and asked if it was a bug, and he'd laughed, actually laughed, the good kind. Thirty-one years of linoleum and fluorescent light and he is good at it, better than people think a man should be proud of being, and some nights that pride is the only clean thing left in him.

The curtains breathe. Streetlight slides along the wall. You feel how the body is heavier than Caleb's in a way that has nothing to do with scale — a dad-bod tiredness, a low thrum of blood pressure meds he forgets some mornings, a lower back that will announce itself the second he's vertical. Ex-smoker's chest, still testing itself for want on bad days, mostly winning. A man who reads his cards at a little shop near Echo Park that smells like sandalwood, who believes, quietly, that the moon does something to Thursdays, who would laugh if you called it faith and mean the laugh and not take it back either.

This morning — yesterday, his yesterday, before whatever shift sleep this is — he'd pulled this same shirt over his head in a gray dawn, sleeve by sleeve, thinking about nothing, thinking about Denise's coffee going cold on the nightstand because she'd fallen back asleep after her alarm, thinking he should tell her he loved her before he left and then not doing it because the moment passed the way moments do, the way he assumes there will always be another one.

The hands come up in front of your face — his face, the mole sitting high and dark on the cheek below it, the jaw already starting its small automatic clench — and you turn them over slowly in the gap-light, stranger's hands, soft-knuckled, a plain band catching what little glow there is.

"Denise," you say, quiet, testing the name in his mouth like it might answer back, "I'm still here."

And somewhere under that, where he can't hear it and never will, the only honest part: not a promise. Not yet a goodbye either.