Wendell Kovac

The mop closet still smells like bleach and somebody else's cigarettes, and you are standing in it in Ronald's skinny-fat arms, holding his phone up to your own borrowed face at four fifty in the morning. You have been Ronald for one minute. That is the whole problem. One minute is enough to feel the ache already starting in his lower back from a shift that hasn't begun, enough to know this body's knees crack on the stairs, enough to remember — no, not remember, this one isn't yours to remember, you only just arrived in it — to *know* that this is a man who empties trash cans until six a.m. for eleven years running and calls it a career. You did not choose him. You never choose them. You just spin, and you get what you get, and this time you got a broom.

So before the first can, before the first hallway, you open the site again on his phone with his thumb, and you spin.

The gap is the first thing — your tongue finds it before your eyes open, a little notch between the front teeth, worn smooth by sixty-three years of finding it. Then the seat under you, cool plastic, a paper cup sweating on a little table bolted to the chair arm, and a board across the room clicking from 47 to 48. Your knee — his knee — stops bouncing on the click, like a held breath let go. You set the cup down square. You fold your hands. Somewhere a woman's voice calls a name that used to be his, and you don't look up, because you don't know it's yours yet, and neither does the room.

Then the shirt gives you the first flash: a memory of buttoning it in a bathroom with a drop-ceiling tile missing a corner, an apartment building's smell — floor wax, fryer grease from 2B, someone's dog two doors down — and Wendell Kovac's hands, blunt and sure, doing up a top button he never fastens on shift because it chokes him by ten a.m. This morning he left it open. This morning he wasn't going to work at all. The waiting room chair under you, the cold plastic of it, gives back a whole year: the lump they found on the routine scan, benign, thank Christ, thank the Virgin and every saint his mother ever lit a candle to, and the six-month follow-ups since that turned this room and this number board into something almost familiar, almost boring, the particular boredom of a man who has been rich enough since the settlement check to never work again and still shows up every day at six a.m. anyway because the building needs him and he does not know how to be a man who doesn't fix things.

The keys in his pocket — you feel them without touching them, the ghost-weight against his thigh from thirty years of habit — bring back Tuesday mornings on a ladder in Building C, ceiling panel up, a resident's smoke detector chirping since March that nobody else would climb up for. He likes the climbing. Sixty-three and he likes it, the pull in his shoulders, proof of something. He never married — came close once, a woman named Diane who wanted Florida and he wanted the same four blocks of Ohio his whole life, and that was that, no grudge, no ache left in it, just a fact he keeps the way he keeps a spare washer in his pocket. No kids. Mass on Sundays, the six-thirty, in and out before anyone can talk to him. A big night at the Elks lodge the second Saturday of the month, two beers past sensible, singing badly. He has never smoked. He has, since he was maybe twenty, always been chewing something — right now, this instant, his jaw is moving on a piece of spearmint gone flat, an unconscious tide his whole face runs on.

The paper cup under his fingers gives the last of it, small and stupid and entirely his: he set it down square because his mother taught him that, sixty years ago, edges matched to the table's edge, and some ninety-year-old dead woman's rule about a paper cup outlived her by decades and is still running this man's hand right now, right here, obedient and warm and completely unaware it belongs to somebody else.

You look down. His forearms, ropy and sun-marked, his own hands, wide and blunt-fingered, turn over on his knee like he's checking they're still attached.

You look up into whatever is across the room — a clerk's window, a clock, nothing that matters — and you say, quietly, around the gap in his teeth: "Forty-eight's me."

Somewhere behind that voice is the next spin, unscheduled, unscheduled the way all of them are, and you don't know if that's in an hour or in a year of Sundays at six-thirty Mass. For now there's just the cup, square on the table, and a name you didn't have five seconds ago, filling up your mouth like it always meant to be there.