Suresh Pillai

Gregory's dimples are still in my face when I sit down at the desk. His house is quiet around me. The finance director's good shoes are by the door, and a glass of something expensive sits sweating on a coaster. I have been him for less than a minute.

He is fine. That is the trouble. The shoulders are narrow and easy, the wrists thin, and the numbers in his head arrange themselves like tidy children. I opened his phone and found a message from a sister, then another, then a long one from a man named Doug about a boat. None of it was mine. None of it was anything, and I could feel the wanting come back the way a tooth begins to ache, slowly and then all at once. I lifted the glass and did not drink. I pressed the cool of it against his dimpled cheek and thought: *enough of this one.*

The wheel is already turning on the screen. I do not watch it land.

—

Dark. A bed under me, a pillow gone warm against one ear. The phone is six inches from my face and my thumb has stopped mid-scroll. Then the thumb starts again, faster and steadier than it was, flicking past whatever he was looking at. Blue light sits on my cheek. My eyes have forgotten to blink, and I make them.

The air is cold on the foot that has come out from under the blanket. Somewhere below me a house is sleeping. A radiator ticks, and a floorboard settles under somebody else's weight, or no one's.

The cotton shirt is soft from a thousand washes, and it gives me the first of him. It is a morning, years back. He pulls a different shirt over this same head, flannel, in a kitchen that smells of cardamom and coffee. A woman is laughing at him because the buttons are wrong, and he lets her fix them. Her knuckles are warm against his collarbone. It is not my feeling. It is his, plain as bread: *this, every day, I would take this.*

The sheet under my palm is rough, and a different night comes. A baby heavy on this chest, then a second child, then a third, and a fourth small body asleep across his shins while he stays rigid so as not to wake it. His back aches in the memory exactly as it aches now, low and left, the carpenter's ache. My body knows it without being asked.

The thumb moves, and I feel the callus at its edge catch the glass. The hands are broad and dry, hard across the pads. They know a nail gun's kick before the trigger, know the coiled hose and the cold of a fresh slab through boot soles. I taste a ghost of wintergreen and tobacco under my tongue, and the corner of my mouth wants a toothpick. It is a habit so old it has worn a groove in the jaw.

The wedding band is a thin, warm pressure on the left hand. When I turn it with my thumb, a year opens. The money, the careful counting at a kitchen table, a little put away and never touched. A son's tuition. A quiet pride he never said aloud, only carried in the shoulders. No god in any of it. Only work, and a wife asleep nearby, and the plain fact of being enough.

My own breath is slow, the chest wide, fifty-nine years heavy in the knees. The moustache is rough against my upper lip.

I lower the phone to the sheet. The screen dims, and the room comes up out of it.

I look at my hand. I turn it over, palm and back, the ring catching the last of the light. Then I lift my eyes.

"Hello, Suresh," I say, low, so the house will not wake.

How long do I get? The wanting is quiet in him. For now.