Wayne Ketterman

You are standing at a sink in Anchorage with the water running, in a body that is twenty years old and five foot three, and you are looking at the dimples in the mirror and feeling nothing about them. Eighteen minutes. He had a lecture at noon and a sister who texts in capital letters. His thumbs are quick and his knees click when he crouches, and none of it is wrong, exactly. It is only that you went through his phone looking for something to want and found a grocery list. You say good-bye to the mirror. The page is already open on the counter, and the wheel is already turning.

Then the room is gone, and you are sitting up in bed with your back against a pillow and one foot asleep beneath you. A phone is warm in both hands. The screen is full of notifications for a name that is not his, and under them his own face comes up in the glass, an old wallpaper surfacing beneath the new one. Your thumb starts down through a stranger's messages at the speed of someone catching up on his own.

The first thing you know is the weight. Everything is bigger and slower than the boy was, a long frame settled into itself, shoulders that ache pleasantly from sitting still. Your left leg is folded under you, and the right one is bouncing against the quilt, a tiny steady drumming that you did not start and cannot stop.

The quilt is under your palm, and the pattern comes up through the skin: blue-and-cream squares, his wife's mother's, a winter in a rented house with a space heater, and him lying on this exact cloth telling a baby the names of the colors. It's a warm, unhurried memory that he never once examined. Your thumb brushes the phone's cracked corner and you get the other thing, the humiliation of the secondhand purchase. His son-in-law handed it over, saying *Dad, just try the app*, and he said sure, and he did not want to be a man who needed one. Then the gold band on your left hand clicks against the case. Thirty-eight years. A courthouse hallway, her laughing at his tie, and a deep bone-level gratitude that has never needed words.

The shirt is soft cotton, worn thin at the collar, and as it moves against your shoulders you feel him putting it on this morning. His hands find the hem and pull it down over the stomach he has stopped apologizing for. The coffee was already cold on the porch rail. The pickup was ticking in the driveway of the new subdivision, where every house looks like its neighbor. He stood there longing for a cigarette, quit eleven years ago, and let the want pass through him the way a man lets a truck pass. Under the sleeve, against your upper arm, the tattoo seems to hum. A woman's face in black and gray, someone he lost, or someone he is merely keeping. The memory stays shut. Only the ache comes through, and it is as clean as a bell.

His knees tell you about forty years of Texas heat. His back is stiff but forgiving, and his lungs are slow and wide, a man who breathes like he has all day. Somewhere downstairs a screen door clicks, and the evening drink, bourbon and one ice cube, is already a promise in his throat.

You lift your hands. They're freckled, with big knuckles and a ring that will not come off without soap. You turn them over slowly, palm and back, palm and back. Then you look up and say, in a low voice with gravel and Texas in it, "Well. Hello, Wayne."

The leg keeps bouncing. Nothing tells you how long this one lasts, or when the wanting will start again, or whether you will still be him when the light changes.