A Team of Rivals

Headlights slide across the ceiling, sweep the room, and go dark again.

The four of us sit at the kitchen table. House ticking around us, settling its bones. The refrigerator hums. The faucet is giving up a single drop every forty seconds.

The twenty-four-year-old’s been riding his chair on two legs. He rocks forward, lets the chair smack the tile, and wheels from the table.

He swaggers to the window. The glass, blackened by night, reflects the scene back to him.

Lean. Barefoot. T-shirt hanging off capped shoulders.

He lifts one arm and scratches the back of his neck. The sleeve pulls tight across his back.

He leans forward, inspects his reflection. Drums his fingers on the countertop.

“She was in the dream again last night,” he says.

The old guy, distinguished, is the word he’d use. Silver at the temples, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, the kind of man you’d trust with your car keys. Your retirement account.

He leans back. Crosses one leg over the other. “It’s just a dream,” he says. “People dream.”

“Not like this,” the young one says. “She was sitting right here,” he slaps the counter with the flat of his hands, “on this countertop,” he slaps it again. “And you know what she says to me?”

We wait.

“‘I’m drenched.’ That’s what she says. ‘I’m drenched.’”

The old guy adjusts his glasses.

“So what?” he says.

The youngster scoffs. “So what?”

“Yes, so what. You dream about a woman you used to know. That’s biology. Hormones. Youth.”

The young one’s lip curls into a smirk.

“You don’t believe that.”

The old one shrugs. “Limbic system. That’s all it is.”

Logical, isn’t it? And yet he’s also the guy thumbing Facebook, looking up his ‘work wife,’ old flames, high school sweethearts — ones who slipped the net.

Just a man of quiet dignity catching up with old friends, the way anyone would.

Not a married man hunched over his phone in a grocery store parking lot, engine running, wife waiting at home.

The young one paces, circles the table once. Loose in the hips, smiling at nothing.

“God, I can even hear her voice,” he says. “How she’d say my name. Not just say it…auhh… that voice,” he grunts.

“Sit down,” the older one says.

“I can hear it!”

“I said sit down.”

The third one hasn’t spoken.

He’s the one I can’t look at.

Boxers, stained undershirt. Pink swollen feet shifting in his grease-stained moccasins, heels mashed flat, suede gone shiny. One ashen heel lifted, like he might stand, like he might not.

He’s got the belly I keep meaning to lose and the posture of a man who fell asleep watching TV and woke up in the wrong conversation.

Knuckles gone thick. Wedding ring, dull.

He’s been watching the hallway. The bedroom door, cracked two inches, a bar of darkness where the wife sleeps with one hand curled under her chin, the way she does.

He shifts in his chair. “You deleted her number,” he says. His first words all night. To neither of them. To both of them.

“Six months ago,” the older one confirms. “Clean break. Long overdue.”

The young one shakes his head. “Got it right here,” he taps his temple. “Know it by heart.”

“That’s not your heart,” the old guy says.

Down the hall, a mattress spring adjusts. Small sound. A body finding a cooler patch of sheet in the dark.

The faucet does its thing.

The young one sits back down. Leans forward, forearms on the table, like he’s about to tell you where the money is.

“What if I just drove past?” he says. “Wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t even slow down. See the porch light, television flickering across the blinds,” he smiles, “just roll past and keep right on going,” he grins. “Ghost in the night.”

The old guy nods. “That could work, actually. You give yourself permission. You see the house. See that she’s got her own life now. The fantasy collapses. You drive home. Cured.”

The young one points at him. “Yes.“

The man in his undershirt looks at his hands. They’re the same hands as the other two, just softer. He fingers the hangnail he’s been picking at all week. He opens his mouth.

The young one throws his head back. “Remember that night?”

“Don’t.”

“When she just showed up. Pounding on the door.”

“Leave it alone, I said.”

The man in the undershirt reaches for the phone beside the salt shaker.

The screen lights his face. For a second, he’s all blue. Eyesockets and cheekbones.

No messages.

He opens the browser.

The old one says nothing.

The young one leans forward.

The search bar waits.

He types the first two letters of her name.

The phone knows the rest.

He stares at the screen.

The old one adjusts his glasses.

He puts the phone face down on the table.

The young one deflates.

“What are you doing?”

The man in the undershirt stands.

Carries the glass to the sink. Throws the handle up. Watches the water climb the inside, spill over the rim, wash over his hand, turn, vanish. He runs it longer than he needs to. The water is cold. Then it isn’t.

He shuts off the faucet. Waits. Stands there with one hand on the counter, one on the handle. The kitchen window, blackened by night, reflects the scene back to him.

The kitchen table holds its little meeting. Four chairs. Three shadows. Nothing settled.

A car passes outside. Headlights drag across the ceiling and find the room again.

The table.

The chairs.

The phone, face down.

The man standing alone at the sink in a stained undershirt, picking at a torn place beside his thumb.

He reaches. Finds the tile backsplash, the faceplate. Fingers down the switch.

In the hallway, the carpet cools under his feet. The bedroom door gives a small complaint when he pushes through.

His wife lies asleep, facing the wall.

He slides into bed.

For a while, he lies on his back and looks at the ceiling.

Somewhere in the pipes, water trickles to an unknown destination.

He turns toward her. Fits himself against her back.

She reaches for his hand without waking.

Their fingers find each other and fill the emptiness between them.

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