Wesley Hartigan

You are standing in a dentist's kitchen in Pittsburgh with a glass of water going warm in your hand, and you know the answer already. Terrence Okonkwo-Bell has good hands. Twenty-eight days of them, steady and narrow, the knuckles long. This afternoon a woman in the second chair said, kindly, that his hands were shaking, and they were not. Nothing was wrong with him. The tremor was in you, the old appetite coming up through a body that had stopped being new. You have been looking at the same freckles in the same mirror for a month. So you put the glass down. Pittsburgh is quiet outside, and the phone is already open to the wheel. You do not say goodbye to him. You press the button.

Then you are bent over a sink with foam on your lip.

Tap running. Cold porcelain under your left palm. The brush is moving in your right hand, mid-stroke, bristles dragging along the outside of the teeth, and the mint is sharp enough to make your eyes water. The air is thick, wet, a summer that has soaked into the walls. A ring is pressing the bone of your finger.

You stop. Start again on the other side, slower, working the back molars. His jaw is clenched, and you let it go, and it tightens again by itself.

The shirt comes first. Soft, thin cotton, washed to the texture of a dishrag, and the sleeve edge rides against the bicep. He pulled it from the drawer this morning in the dark so he would not wake her. His fingers know the drawer. Then the first memory comes up through the cloth. A woman's laugh in a hallway, his own wife, her hand flat on his chest saying you smell like pipe dope. Warmth, then a small ache underneath it, because lately she says it less.

The counter is under your palm, and it gives you the rest. A bathroom in a stranger's house, last Thursday, kneeling on tile with his head under a vanity, a wrench that was too big for the space, sweat running into his beard. A homeowner talking over him about her ex. He felt then what he feels now, a low contentment in the work, in fixing what leaks. Then the other thing arrives, folded small. A girl he used to see. A text he did not answer. His thumb hovered over it for an hour in the truck. Nobody knows that, and now you do.

His knees ache. Not sharply, just the ledger of twenty years of kneeling. His shoulders are strong. The wedding band is warm against the sink edge, and when you turn it with your thumb he thinks of nothing, because it is only habit.

You rinse twice. Spit. The water runs grey, then clear. You stand the brush bristles-up in the glass, out of the grey water it has always sat in.

You look at your hands. Blunt, freckled, the nails clipped short, a plumber's scars of use but no marks you would name. The ring is plain. You turn them over. They are not shaking.

You lift your eyes to the mirror and the blue ones look back.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is lower than the last one. "Hello."

The tap is still running. You do not know how long he lasts, or when the wanting comes back, or whether you will still be standing in this tomorrow.