Todd Resnick

You have been Brendan Suchocki for three minutes, and three minutes is plenty.

You are standing behind a register that isn't yours, in a vest that smells like somebody else's cigarettes even though the man never smoked, and the Sunday light through the store's front windows is that flat desert white that makes everything look like it's already over. Your hand — his hand, short-fingered, a thin white scar across one knuckle you didn't earn — is resting on the counter next to a little dish of pennies. Somewhere behind your sternum, a half-second of him: locking the register drawer out of habit at a store that isn't even open yet today, a Sunday shift he resents the shape of. It's not your memory. It arrived anyway, the way they do, and already you're tired of having other men's Tuesdays show up uninvited in your chest.

Skinny fat, 5'8", a body that apologizes for itself in the mirror. Nothing wrong with him, exactly. Nothing you wanted, either. Three minutes was enough to know you'd made a mistake picking this one up, the way you know a shirt is wrong the second your arms are through the sleeves. There's a phone in the vest pocket that isn't yours either. You don't check it. You take it out, thumb already finding vessel.cards from some muscle memory that is entirely your own, carried forward through every body you've worn, the one thing that's actually yours now.

You spin because you can. Because the last one didn't take, and the one before that didn't either, not really, and there's a particular kind of hunger that doesn't care about Brendan Suchocki's Sunday or his register or his life, a hunger that just wants to know who's next.

The wheel turns somewhere you can't see it turning.

—

The ball is in the air and you are the one watching it, and your mouth is open, and there is a can in your hand gone warm as bathwater.

The room exhales. The television throws blue light across a gut that rises and falls once, hard, with a breath that isn't a flinch so much as a resurfacing. Your thumb — his thumb, broader than Brendan's, the nail bitten short — finds the volume rocker on the remote with a certainty that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with forty-four years of evenings exactly like this one. The second replay plays. You watch the ball and not the score, because some reflex older than you is still steering the eyes for one more second before you catch up to where you are.

Where you are is a couch in Houston. Evening light, gone amber, lying across a window that looks onto a fenced yard. A pillow gone soft at one corner from years of the same head. Your sock is pushed half off one foot and resting on a coffee table scattered with a remote, a water bottle, somebody's child's drawing folded in quarters.

The can is the first key. Cold aluminum sweating in a hand that has held a thousand like it — a Tuesday on the back porch after the kids went down, a wedding reception where he drank exactly two and switched to water because Carol was watching, a fishing trip with his brother-in-law that ended in a truck bed looking at stars neither of them could name. The hand remembers the particular give of the can under too much grip. Big night once or twice a month, never more, because something happened once in his twenties that he doesn't tell people about and you only get the edge of it — a parking lot, a friend's car keys taken out of a friend's hand, the relief of having done one thing right that night.

The shirt is the second key, and it opens wider. This morning — his morning, hours behind this evening in a body-logic that doesn't need to make sense to be true — pulling this exact shirt over his head in a bedroom with the blinds still down, Carol's side of the bed already made because she's up before him every day of her life. The shirt was folded on the dresser from the dryer, still warm. He'd stood there in his boxers rubbing the mole on his cheek the way he does when he's deciding whether today is a day he can stand to go to work, and today was a Sunday, and he wasn't supposed to go to work, and the relief of that had been a small physical thing, a loosening in the shoulders. He'd put the shirt on anyway because that's what you do with a free day, you put on the soft shirt and you sit down and the day happens to you.

The ring is the third key and it is the deepest one. The band on the left hand, plain, a little loose now that he's heavier than the day Carol slid it on. Seventeen years. A courthouse before either of them could afford the wedding they wanted, and then the wedding they wanted two years later anyway, renewed in front of both families, her mother crying for reasons that were only half about happiness. Three kids — the memory won't give you an exact count beyond three, just an impression of noise at dinner, of a minivan, of a name called up a staircase more times in a day than should be possible. And under all of it, worn thin and still there: Danielle. College. A girl who didn't become Carol and who he still thinks about sometimes, not with longing exactly, more like checking a scar to see if it still hurts, finding that it does, a little, and being almost grateful for that.

His body under your attention: forty-four and heavier than he means to be, a softness at the middle that aches faintly in the lower back by the end of a shift, feet that know the particular flat-footed shuffle of eight hours on linoleum at the nursing home, hands that are stronger than they look — turning patients, lifting what needs lifting, steady with a needle he isn't even supposed to be the one holding half the time. Hands that right now, even slack with sleep a second ago, are already restless, the fingers of the one not holding the can tapping once against his thigh, an old tic with no memory attached to it at all, just a body that has never known how to be still.

You feel the receded hairline against the back of the couch cushion, the long hair at the sides brushing his collar, the clean-shaven jaw he ran a razor over at six this morning out of some discipline that has survived three kids and a job that would forgive him for skipping it.

He is a good man, probably. You can feel that much in the furniture of him — the patience worn into his shoulders, a job that doesn't pay what it should and that he does anyway, a wedding band he's never once taken off. None of that is why you're here. You're here because Brendan Suchocki's Sunday afternoon in a dead-end store was nothing, and this — a couch, a warm can, a family somewhere in the house behind you, a whole unexplored life sitting right there in his hands — is more than nothing, and that was the whole decision, right there, as small and as ugly as that.

You lift the hand with the can in it and look at it like it might answer something.

"Hey," you say, to no one, to the empty room, your voice coming out lower than you expected, and you don't know yet if you'll say anything else, or when you'll want to leave this one, or if you'll even get to choose.