Warren Ketterman

You are leaving Brandon Yoder because of the headphones. Five minutes in him, and you stood at the mixer in the dark of some basement with a room of people waiting on you, and the thing in your chest was not joy. It was a flat, patient nothing, and the song you were about to play was one he had played forty times. His hands knew it. You wanted a man whose hands knew something you did not. You say it to yourself plainly: you wanted to be surprised. Then the page, the wheel, the small click of it deciding.

You are at a sink. The tap is running and there is foam on your lip, and your arm is mid-stroke, so the brush stops, and for a moment you stand there with a mouth full of mint and no idea what the man was thinking. The light over the mirror hums. The window is blue and not yet morning. Your feet are bare on a rug that is damp at the edges.

You start the brush again on the other side, slower, and the back molars ache a little under the bristles. Your knees register first. Six foot four is a long way down to a low sink, and your lower back has an opinion about it. Your shoulders are loose and your arms are heavy and sound. This is a body that was strong for a long time and is now merely dependable.

The brush handle is worn smooth where his thumb rides. Something comes up through it. It is a different bathroom, a pink-tiled one, with three small toothbrushes in a cup and a girl's voice saying *Dad, you're doing it wrong.* He was laughing around the foam, and the dimples in his cheeks went deep. You feel them now, two cuts of warmth that do not leave when you stop smiling. Three of them, in that cup. Then the rinse, and the memory is gone.

You rinse twice. The water in the basin is grey, and the brush has always sat in it, and for reasons that are not yours you stand it bristles-up in the glass. A small mercy to a small thing.

The shirt hangs soft against your back. It is cotton gone thin with washing, and the sleeve comes with the morning: he pulled it from the drawer in the dark, because he has not slept past five since the plant closed. He did not turn on the lamp. He stood in the cold of the room and put one arm in, then the other, and thought of Dana. Not with grief. It was the way you think of a town you used to live in. She had laughed at his pen, the one he clicks without noticing, click and click through every sermon, and she had put her hand over his in the pew at First Methodist. You have no pen. Your right thumb moves anyway against nothing, click, click.

The pants are soft and loose at the waist. The tile is cold through the rug. Under it there is the smell of the room, soap and old steam and a faint trace of cedar, and it opens something larger: a Sunday, a porch, coffee going cold in a mug, the main street with its one light swinging red over the empty road and the closed diner he still looks at every morning as if it might open. He has never had a drink and never wanted one. He has money enough, and no one to say it to. The phone rings less now. The kids call on Sundays, three voices, one at a time, and he saves the good questions for them.

You turn off the tap. The quiet is enormous. You lift your right hand from the sink and turn it over. The knuckles are big, the palm is creased and callused, and the skin on the back is thin and spotted with weather. It is not Brandon's hand. It is not yours. You close it slowly and it closes.

You look up into the mirror at a face with two deep dimples and blue eyes, and the face looks back as if it has been waiting.

"Morning, Warren," you say, and the voice is low and unhurried, and it is not what you expected.

Somewhere under that is the other question, the one that is always there, and you do not ask it aloud. How long.