Walter Prescott

You are standing at a griddle that isn't yours, in a body that isn't yours either, and the smell of onions is doing something to a memory that belongs to somebody else entirely — some line cook's ex-girlfriend, some Tuesday that isn't yours to keep. That's the trouble with the bald one, the cleft chin, the 41-year-old you've been wearing for less than a minute of your own life. He came with too much furniture already in the house. You keep tripping over him. The manager yells something about the ticket times and you feel this man's shoulders tighten with an old, practiced resentment, and you think: no. Not this one. Not tonight. Your phone is in your pocket, screen already lit from the last time you checked it, vessel.cards sitting there patient as a held breath, and you go into the walk-in freezer for cover and you spin it again, because the wanting doesn't wait for a good reason, it just waits for a door to close.

The foam is still on your lip when you arrive.

You feel the sink before you feel anything else — cool porcelain lip under your left palm, water running hot enough to fog the mirror at the edges, and a toothbrush gripped in your right hand, already moving, already three strokes into a rhythm you didn't start. Your knees announce themselves first: a low ache, both sides, old-man cartilage, the specific complaint of a body that has stood on tile floors for decades. You finish the stroke you're mid-way through — you have to, the arm doesn't stop just because someone new is steering it — and then you cross to the other side of your mouth, slower now, working the back molars like there's something to prove.

The shirt hasn't gone on yet. You're bare-chested, sixty-five years of sun damage across the shoulders, boxer shorts, a small dark tattoo on the upper arm you don't recognize until the towel bar under your other hand gives you a flash: a batter's stance, a Little League trophy shelf, a son named DJ who begged him to get it when DJ made varsity and Walter, half a beer in, said what the hell, why not. That's the name arriving now, unbidden — Walter — riding in on cheap ink and a boy's pride.

The sink keeps giving. Grey water pooling where the toothbrush always stands, bristles down, because that's how you've done it for forty years and never thought to change, and under that thought is a whole marriage — Denise, thirty-one years of it, her toothbrush that used to stand right there in the cracked mug beside yours until one Tuesday it didn't, until the mug just had the one brush in it and you bought this bathroom nothing since, not a tile, not a bar of soap, because putting money into a place you're divorced in front of feels like admitting you live there. Three kids came out of that marriage — DJ, and Renata, and the youngest, Christopher, who calls on Sundays out of duty more than want, and you love him anyway, the duty and all of it.

The uniform is on the hook behind the door — you haven't touched it yet but you can smell it, the specific mildew-and-Windex smell of a lobby desk at 2 a.m., and the memory it gives you when you finally reach for it, sleeve by sleeve, is not this morning's but a thousand mornings folded into one: the black shirt going on heavy across shoulders that ache by hour six every single shift, the belt cinched over a gut that used to be flatter, the radio clipped where it always clips, the flashlight with the worn rubber grip that your hand finds without looking because your hand has found it ten thousand times. Your lower back complains the second the belt sits on it — an old, permanent complaint, present tense forever now, something a chiropractor once called "just wear" and charged you two hundred dollars to call it that. You drink a rum and Coke most nights after the shift, alone, watching whatever's on, and you go to church on Sundays that you can make it to, and you believe, plainly and without much drama, that somebody is watching all of this and keeping score kindly.

None of this — not the ex-wife, not the boy's trophy shelf, not the ache riding low in the spine — is anything you asked for. It just comes up through the porcelain, through the bristles, through the terrycloth of a towel that still has his shape worn into it.

You rinse twice, the way he always does. You stand the brush bristles-up, out of the grey water, the way he always does. And you look down at the hand still resting on the lip of the sink — the pale stripe of skin on the ring finger, thinner and paler than the rest, a wedding band's ghost — and you turn it over slowly under the bathroom light, watching the tendons move like you've never seen tendons before, because you haven't, not on this hand.

You lift your eyes into the mirror, into your own reflection wearing this stranger's face, and you say, quiet, mostly to see if the voice is really his now:

"Denise would've killed me for the state of this sink."

You don't know how long you get him. You never do.