Wendell Kratzer

It is a Saturday morning doing nothing in particular, which is the only kind of morning that makes room for a thing like this. You have had the site open in a tab for three days, telling yourself you would not. You have wanted this since you were young enough that wanting it felt like a secret worth keeping — the stories, the threads, the question of what it would be to simply not be the one driving anymore. Vessel.cards. A wheel rendered in flat, cheap graphics, a button that says SPIN, a price that seemed insulting until you paid it. You click it the way you'd pull a trigger you didn't believe was loaded.

The wheel spins. It does not ask your name. It does not ask anything.

You are leaning over a sink. Your jaw is half foam, half bare, and a razor is pressed flat against skin that is not cold anymore, that is warm with blood that is not — was not — yours to think about. There is no seam, no falling, no travel. One moment there is a tab and a button, and the next there is tile under bare feet and a window going white with Nashville morning and a hand — his hand, now the only hand there is — drawing the razor up the grain in one unbroken pull, through the place at the corner of the mouth where, every single morning for eleven years, he has slowed down. You do not slow down. You don't know yet that there was ever a reason to.

The water runs. The foam goes down the drain in gray ribbons. And then it is just you, standing in a stranger's weight, looking at a stranger's face in a medicine-cabinet mirror with a razor still warm in your fingers.

It comes in through the razor first, because the razor is what you're holding. A cheap double-edge, the kind you buy in a three-pack and don't think about, except he thinks about this one — it was his father's style, not his father's actual razor, because Wendell never got anything of his father's, but the habit of it, the standing-and-leaning, the refusal to use the electric thing his last girlfriend bought him that sits in a drawer with the cord still twist-tied. Shaving is church to him. Small, repeatable, his. You feel the muscle memory of the hesitation that didn't happen this time — a flinch-shaped absence at the corner of his mouth, where fourteen years ago a different razor caught him mid-sentence on the phone with his ex-wife and opened a line that bled for twenty minutes and scared him worse than it should have. He has slowed there ever since without deciding to. You didn't. The memory arrives anyway, apologizing for itself.

The plaid shirt against your back gives you the rest, sleeve by sleeve. You feel him pulling it on forty minutes before this — no, you feel it being pulled on, his shoulders rolling into it the way a man moves when his shoulders ache a little every morning now and have for a couple of years, the dull, structural ache of forty pounds of ladder and five-gallon buckets and reaching overhead with a roller for hours at a stretch. Skinny everywhere except the soft give at the middle, the body of a man who is strong in exactly the ways his work demands and nowhere else. The shirt is soft from washing, a little thin at the elbows, and putting it on this morning he thought, distracted, about the Edmondson Pike house — a dining room he's got taped off, drop cloths weighted at the corners against the window AC's draft, a client who wants "greige" and can't tell any greige from any other greige. Tomorrow's a workday. He thought about his girlfriend, Priya, texting him a photo of a dog she saw on her run, and he smiled at the sink before he even picked up the razor.

The corduroy pants at his hips carry something older and rougher — his ex, Carlene, who he was with for six years and who left fourteen months ago saying he loved paint more than he loved people, which wasn't fair, which he has turned over at two a.m. more nights than he'd admit. The two kids are hers and his, a boy and a girl, eleven and eight, who live with Carlene four days a week and who he picks up Friday afternoons smelling of primer no matter how hard he scrubs. He loves them in a way that feels too big for his chest, the way faith feels too — he goes to Mass less than his mother would like but he still crosses himself in the truck before a big job, still says a decade of the rosary some nights driving home from a house that didn't go well.

His hands know things without him. They know how to cut a clean line against tape without looking, how to feather a lap mark so it disappears, how to hold a brush loose enough that his wrist doesn't scream by five o'clock. Fifty-one years old and his knees complain on ladders now, and there's a callus map across both palms that reads like a language only he speaks. His hands aren't thinking about any of that right now. Left alone a second too long, they crack their knuckles, one after another, an old tic nobody's ever broken him of — Carlene hated it, Priya doesn't seem to mind — and you feel the small release in each joint like a door shutting softly down a long hallway.

There is money underneath all of it, quiet money, the kind that doesn't show — fifteen years of being the best painter three zip codes have, of word of mouth and cash jobs and never once touching a drink because his own father drank the family into a smaller house twice over, and Wendell swore off it before he was twenty and never looked back, never missed it, never needed the cigarette either though half the crews he's worked offered him one a day for a decade. He has more saved than anyone who meets him in paint-crusted overalls would guess. He has never told Priya the number. He's not sure why not.

You straighten up at the sink. Half the beard is gone, close and clean along the jaw, dark with gray flecked at the chin, the other half still rough with two days' growth. The mole sits high on his cheek the way it always has, the one thing anyone ever says they'd recognize him by across a bar. Green eyes in the mirror, not yours, not anymore not-yours in any way that matters.

You look down at the hand holding the razor. You turn it over — the calluses, the fine white flecks of old paint ground into the lines of the palm like something fossilized — and it does not feel like borrowing. It feels like arriving somewhere with the lights left on for you.

You lift your eyes to the mirror, into your own reflection, which is his.

"Didn't even flinch," you say, to no one, to him, to whoever's listening on the other side of a screen that isn't there anymore, and your voice has his flat Tennessee edges on it already, like you'd always had them.

You don't know how long this one is for. You don't put the razor down yet.