Wesley Trumbauer

The screen has been the only light for an hour, maybe more. Nothing on, nothing worth finishing, the kind of night that exists only to be gotten through. You have scrolled past all of it before — the wheel, the pitch, the fine print nobody reads because nobody expects it to matter — but tonight the card reads DRAW and something in you, some old itch worn smooth from years of wanting exactly this and never once being able to buy it, presses down before the doubt can catch up. You pay. You spin. The wheel does what wheels do, and then it stops doing anything at all, because there is no more wheel, there is no more screen, there is a spoon.

The spoon is already moving when you arrive, and you arrive already mid-turn, stirring something pale and steaming in a pan too small for the burner it's on. The stirring stops. It reverses, slow, deliberate, the wrong direction from whatever momentum was in the wrist a half-second ago. You salt the pan without tasting it — his habit, not yours, but your hand does it anyway because it is his hand — and then you are reaching into the cabinet above the stove for a second plate, and you set it down next to the first one, and neither plate means anything to you yet.

The kitchen is dim, one bulb over the range doing all the work, and it is the middle of the night here in a way it wasn't in the room you left — his night is deeper, later, the fluorescent hum of a man awake when the whole street isn't. That's the first thing the body tells you before anything else does: a low ache behind the eyes that isn't yours, the specific tiredness of somebody who cooks for one at an hour built for sleeping because his shift ran long or his sleep never learned how to come easy since the divorce. The shirt is next — cotton, soft from a hundred washes, and putting it on this morning comes back to you in his shoulders: one arm up, a hitch and a wince as the left one clears the sleeve, an old catch in that shoulder that has never once, in twelve years, let a doctor fix it all the way. Rotator cuff, a fall off a ladder with a sheet of glass under one arm, the job finished anyway because the job always got finished. It throbs now, low and familiar, when you lift the spoon again.

The apron hook by the door isn't touched tonight, but your hand grazes the pocket of these sweatpants and something else surfaces — his ex-wife's laugh, from a kitchen that looked almost like this one but wasn't, four years and one town over, the two of them cooking together instead of apart. Her name comes with the memory the way names come with old aches, present but worn soft: Dana. Not a fight that ended it so much as a slow leak, two people who loved each other fine and just couldn't keep living in the same house waiting for something that wasn't coming. He still sets two plates sometimes without meaning to. He did it tonight.

The floor under his boots — no, under your boots now — is cracked linoleum, cold through the socks, and it brings back a whole shop's worth of memory at once: the suction lifter's handle worn smooth in his palm, the particular give of a pane settling into a frame just right, the storefront on Main he redid last spring with the stoplight blinking red-yellow-red in the glass before it was even set. He is good at this work, has been for fourteen years, and his hands know the weight of glass the way other men's hands know a steering wheel — without asking the rest of him first. The forearms carry it: tight, corded, a faint permanent tan line where the gloves stop. Thirty-five years old and the body still does what he asks of it, mostly, except that shoulder, except the knee that clicks going down stairs.

The spoon is still in your hand. The second plate sits there, clean, waiting for food that was never going to reach it — habit outliving the reason for it, the body performing a marriage that ended in paperwork three years back but never quite ended in the muscle. You feel that little grief pass through him like a draft under a door, gone before it can become anything you'd call a thought.

You look down at the hand holding the spoon. Not your hand. Never was. Calloused first two fingers, a thin white scar you didn't put there across one knuckle, nails cut short and practical. You turn it over slowly, watching it in the stove light like it might do something you don't expect.

Then you look up, past the empty second plate, into the dark window over the sink where the glass gives you back a face that isn't yours and never asked to be.

"Guess I'm not eating alone tonight," you say, to no one, in his voice, and you don't know yet if that's a joke or a promise or how long either one of you gets to find out.