Travis Woytek

Gary Dunmore's office chair creaks the same way it creaked yesterday, and the beauty mark on his jaw itches when he thinks too hard about anything, which is often. It is the middle of a Monday morning and he has been Gary for less than a minute, and that minute is already enough. The bald head under the fluorescent light. The gut sitting soft over a belt that used to be someone's idea of authority. Forty-eight years of somebody else's mid-level decisions humming behind eyes that are not yours and never were. You spun for this two nights ago in some other life, in some other man's evening, and it felt like a promotion. It does not feel like anything now except a chair that creaks and a mouse cursor blinking over a spreadsheet nobody asked for. You paid for the wheel because Gary was thick through the middle and slow through the knees and utterly, comprehensively used up, forty seconds after arriving. You want something that isn't sitting down. You open the site on the monitor, right there at the desk, eleven-forty on a Monday, and you spin.

The hose is still running somewhere behind you when the light changes.

Not the sky — your grip. Thumb tucks under the sponge without you telling it to, wrist rolling in a small tight circle you didn't choose, and the suds stop dragging their long swirl marks down the door panel, because the hand doing it now already knows better. You are on one knee on wet gravel. There is a hose looped at your bare foot, cold water somewhere close, warm soap right against your palm, and a man's chest — bare, freckled, a small ring of metal cold against one nipple in the morning air — rising and falling with someone else's breath that you are now the one using.

It comes in through the sponge first. Saturday mornings, dozens of them, this same driveway, this same Buick that isn't even his — it's his neighbor Dale's, and Dale pays him thirty bucks and a case of Coors to keep it looking sharp because Dale's knees went out two winters ago. Travis Woytek doesn't need the thirty bucks. He does it because kneeling here with the sun coming up over cut wheat stubble and a thunderhead already stacking itself black and yellow out past the grain elevator is the only hour of his week that belongs to nobody's pipes but his own.

The shirt against your back gives you the rest, the way cloth always does, sleeve by sleeve. This morning: pulling it over his head still damp from the shower, the piercing catching cold on the fabric for a half-second the way it always does and always surprises him a little, thirty-four years old and it still gets him every time. Jeans next, worn through at one knee already from a job last Tuesday, a crawl space in Garden City with a leak that had been rotting joists for a year before anyone called him. His hands know that kind of dark by feel — where the shutoff valve sits blind, how a pipe wrench bites, the particular give of old solder letting go. Strong hands, calloused across the palm in a pattern no other job leaves. A lower back that already complains some mornings before he's out of bed, thirty-four going on older, from a decade of being folded up under strangers' sinks.

The gravel under your bare feet brings up more: the modest ranch house behind you, paid off faster than it should have been because he doesn't spend on much besides the truck and the occasional flight to Denver to see a friend from trade school. Comfortable, his accountant calls it, like the word costs nothing. He drinks a beer or two most nights on the porch and hasn't smoked in six years and still reaches for a cigarette sometimes with two fingers that find nothing there. He takes a small yellow pill every morning with his coffee, has for three years now, since the year his father died and the quiet after that got loud in a different way; it works, mostly, and he does not talk about it, not even with the men he texts at the gym.

He is single. Has been a long time, comfortably, without the specific ache some men carry about it — a few women over the years, nothing that asked to stay, no one he thinks about at two in the morning. No kids, no ex who calls. On Friday nights at the temple in Hays, forty minutes each way, he sits near the back with his mother, who worries about him being alone out here more than he does. His fingers, when there's nothing to hold, drum against his thigh in a rhythm that isn't a song, just a thing they do, the way some men jingle change.

The soap is going cold in your palm. The last swirl he made, before you, was a perfect wide arc across the door — clean, unconscious, the kind of motion a body makes ten thousand times and stops noticing. You feel the ghost of it leave his shoulder like a held breath let go.

You look down at the sponge, at the freckles scattered like flung paint across knuckles that are not new to work, and you turn the hand over slowly in the gray morning light, water running off it into the gravel.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the car, to the storm stacking up black in the west — and you don't know yet if that's true for an afternoon or for years, only that the hand is yours now and the sponge is still warm.