Terrence Boykin

Mel Halbrook's knees are the first thing you notice, the way they don't want to hold the squat you put them in to get the mail tray off the bottom shelf, even though there's no route today, no reason to be crouched in this hallway except that you told him — told yourself, told this body — you'd sort the flyers before lunch. Fifty-one days in him and the knees still complain the same way at eleven in the morning as they did in the beginning. Gray hair, freckled forearms, a gut that sits low and comfortable. He's fine. He's always been fine. That's the trouble with Mel: nothing in him ever surprises you twice. You know the exact sound his knuckles make. You know the exact five songs on the radio he'll hum along to badly. A body stops being interesting the moment you've learned all its rooms, and you learned Mel's in about four minutes, standing in his kitchen last month feeling him arrive behind your own borrowed eyes for the first time.

So you're at the laptop before you've admitted it to yourself, the tray of mail still on the floor, Boston sun coming in flat and white through the blinds, and vessel.cards is already loaded from last time because you never really closed the tab. You pay. You spin. Somewhere the wheel turns without a sound.

The razor is already moving when you arrive, and that's the strangest part, stranger than the weight, stranger than the foam smell — the hand doesn't stop to let you catch up. It goes up the jaw against the grain, clean, no hesitation at the corner of the mouth where some part of you that isn't you yet knows he always hesitates. You are leaning over a sink you have never seen, half a face in the mirror foamed white, half of it bare and older-looking than the foam side, and the fluorescent bar light over the mirror hums at a pitch Mel's bathroom never had. Your knees don't complain. Nothing complains. You are standing straighter than you have in fifty-one days without trying to.

The razor. Cold metal, contoured grip, a little give in the cartridge head. It comes back first — not a memory so much as a fact arriving with feeling stapled to it: he bought this one because the drugstore was out of his usual and he was late for something, and it turned out fine, better than fine, and he never went back to the old brand. Small satisfaction. A man who notices when a small thing works out and lets himself have that.

The sink under your left palm, cool porcelain, and the ring on that hand — plain gold band — brings his wedding, indoors because her mother's arthritis couldn't take an outdoor one in June, and how relieved he'd been, secretly, not to sweat through the suit. Her name arrives with the day, held gently, the specific gravity of thirteen years of marriage compressed into how his chest sits when he thinks the word *wife*. There's a daughter in there too, seven years old, a bicycle with tassels he bolted on wrong twice before he got it right, her laugh when the training wheels came off and she didn't fall.

Under that — further down, older — there's a woman who isn't the wife, a name that still has a small burn on it though the burn has gone mostly quiet, an apartment on a street he doesn't drive down anymore if he can help it, not out of guilt exactly, more like the way you avoid a tooth that used to ache.

The bare foot against the tile floor gives you the whole apartment before this one, the one he had at twenty-six, thin carpet, no dishwasher, the particular cheapness of being young in this city before the money came — because the money did come, eventually, spreadsheet by spreadsheet, client by client, a corner office he still sometimes doesn't quite believe is his. Two monitors. Fluorescent light he complains about and has never once asked facilities to fix. He is good at the thing he does and finds no romance in it whatsoever, which is its own kind of peace.

His jaw is tight — has been tight this whole time, you realize, clenched under the foam without any thought behind it, an old habit that predates every memory attached to it, just there the way weather is there. The muscle in your — his — forearm, the good visible cut of it, comes from a gym membership he uses with a discipline that has nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with a doctor's appointment two years ago and a number on a printout he has not stopped thinking about since, the sweetness he doesn't put in his coffee anymore, the little kit in the bathroom drawer six inches from where your hand rests right now.

The shirt isn't on yet — he's shirtless, boxers only, and so the clothes give you nothing yet, no cardigan memory, no monring routine — but the towel on the rod behind you, when your hip brushes it, gives you a flash of a hundred Saturday mornings just like this one, foam and blade and the particular privacy of a bathroom door he likes to keep shut even though no one's home yet, wife and daughter out somewhere on a Saturday errand, the house around you quiet in a way Philadelphia gets quiet only midday, only on a weekend, only when a man has nowhere he has to be.

You finish the second side of his face fast, faster than foam-side-one, no hesitation where he always hesitates, and you don't know yet that that's wrong, that's new, that's the first thing about today that isn't his.

You set the razor down. You look at the hand that set it down — his hand, broader than the one you had an hour ago in Boston, a ring on it that isn't yours to be wearing and yet is, now, until further notice.

You turn it over once, studying the palm like it might have an answer written on it.

"There you are," you say to the mirror, and you're not sure yourself whether you mean him or you.