Todd Wysocki

You are standing in Cole Bratcher's kitchen, in Cole Bratcher's neighbor, wearing a body that isn't yours and never will be, and you already know you're leaving it. It's the toothpick that does it — the way this man's jaw works at it without him ever once deciding to, the way his tongue finds it in the corner of his mouth every forty seconds like a tic he inherited instead of grew. You've had it in your mouth for an hour and twelve minutes and you already hate it. Comfortable money, this one. A house two doors down from the kind of money that doesn't have a ceiling. A wife somewhere in Houston who isn't yours to think about long. It should be enough. It was, once, three men ago. But you spun into him already restless, already thinking about the wheel while you were still spinning it, and that's the tell you've learned about yourself in three hundred and forty-three tries: when you notice a man's habits before you notice his life, you're already gone. You take the toothpick out, set it on the counter like you're doing him a courtesy, and you open the site again on his phone with his own thumbprint.

The wheel spins somewhere you don't see, and then you are face-down in sheets that smell like fabric softener and somebody else's sweat, one arm hanging into cooler air, and the light through the curtain gap is going the color of a bruise. Your breath — his breath — catches and evens in the space of one inhale. The hanging arm draws itself up. You roll onto your back and fold your hands on your chest like a man laid out for a viewing, and somewhere outside, thunder rolls over wheat stubble that goes on longer than any street you've ever driven.

The sheets are the first thing. Cheap, county-motel cotton, and through them comes a flash of last night — no, this morning, whichever it was, the two a.m. shift change and the drive back with the radio off because after eight hours of engine noise silence feels like church. Then the shirt. It's not on you yet, it's folded over a chair somewhere in this same dark room, but your hand already knows its weight from some memory not yours, sliding into it sleeve by sleeve at 5:40 in the morning while a woman still asleep in this same bed made a small sound and rolled toward the warm spot he'd left. Denise. Her name arrives soft and immediate, the way names do when you've said them ten thousand times. Fifteen years married. No kids — a thing they stopped talking about somewhere around year eight, not from sadness exactly, more like a door they closed gently and never opened again because the room behind it wasn't for them.

The bed frame under your back gives you the motel — three nights a week here because the district route starts before the light does and the drive home isn't worth it, forty-five minutes each way on roads that flood when it rains like this is about to. The pillow gives you the bus: forty-one feet of it, county plates, kids on the reservation route who call him Mr. W because Wysocki defeats them, and a girl in the third row last spring who threw up on the steps and he didn't even flinch, just radioed it in and started passing out the paper towels he keeps for exactly that. The window gives you the storm — how he watches these thunderheads stack up over stubble fields on his afternoon route with something like relief, because out here weather is the only thing bigger than the job, and today's had that low copper light that means it's going to open up before six.

Your own studs in both earlobes, small and forgotten, give you nothing but the memory of Denise picking them out at a kiosk in Wichita on their honeymoon, laughing that he'd never wear them, and how he has, every day since, out of some stubbornness that outlasted the joke. The wedding band on the left hand is warmer than the rest of you, worn smooth at the inside curve from fifteen years of a thumb worrying it in traffic. You feel the whole marriage in it at once — not a scene, not an argument, just the accumulated weight of a woman who still makes him laugh at fifty-one and the ordinary miracle of that.

His body underneath all of it: shorter than you expected to feel, thick through the middle in a way that isn't shame, just Tuesday, just thirty-four years of gas station coffee and a desk-height driver's seat. Bad lower back from the bus's shocks. Strong hands, blunt and sure, that have learned to swing a door lever and check three mirrors at once without a single thought behind it. A body that knows heat and long silences and the particular boredom of watching wheat go by that isn't boredom at all if you've grown up inside it.

You lie there in the folded-hand posture he has never once slept in, and you feel him — all of him, gone now, not screaming, not anywhere — recede the way they always do, leaving you the furniture of a life with nobody home in it.

You bring your hand up off your chest and look at it. Blunt fingers, plain gold band, a crescent of grease under one nail that the shower missed last night. You turn it over once, like it might explain something, and outside the window the thunderhead finally breaks and rain starts hammering the motel roof in Kansas while eleven hundred miles west it's still just morning.

"Denise," you say to the empty room, testing the shape of it in his voice, not sure yet if you mean it as her husband or as a man deciding how long he can stand to be one.