Carlos Bautista

Russell Pemberton's hands are wrong before they're even his. You feel that the moment you land in him, standing in the fitting room mirror, tape measure still looped around his neck like a stole. Fifty-one years old, six-three, gray hair going silver at the temples, forearms freckled from forty years of window light. A client's half-pinned hem lies over the ottoman. He is good at this — was good at this, will keep being good at this for whoever spins him next — and that is exactly the problem. Three days ago you let him take a commission for a wedding party of nine, and it has been fittings and chalk and standing on this same square of carpet ever since. You did the math this morning, sipping his bad decaf: measuring inseams for a living, however many millions it's put in the man's accounts, is not what you came back to the wheel six hundred and seventy-three times to feel. You want your hands doing something that isn't patience. You set the tape measure down on the ottoman, mid-afternoon light coming flat through the shop window, and you think, not even goodbye, just: enough of this one. You open the site on his phone. The wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, the way it always is by the time you admit you've decided.

It lands you standing at the foot of an unmade bed, one hand flat on your own chest, feeling ribs that are not the ribs you had four seconds ago.

Shorter. Compact. A gut that sits differently, hips that ache in a way Russell's never did. The shirt under your palm is dress-white, half-buttoned wrong, and the mismatch itches at you before you understand why — a button in the wrong hole, one side hanging low. Your fingers move on their own, undoing three buttons and redoing them, and somewhere underneath that motion is a lifetime of doing exactly this, correctly, ten thousand mornings running. A tie hangs loose around your collar, striped, cheap, and your hands lift it and begin a knot the closet has never seen before — not the four-in-hand this man's fingers know blind, but something looser, foreign, yours.

The room arrives around the correction: beige carpet, a lamp throwing yellow against white walls, the rattle of an L train somewhere outside going toward the Loop, dusk-blue at the window instead of afternoon. Early evening here. End of a shift that, in Phoenix, is still just lunch.

The shirt gives it to you first, because the shirt is what your hands are touching. A flash: him buying six of these, identical, at a uniform store on Cicero, because if they're all the same he never has to think about it before five in the morning. Another flash, longer: him ironing this exact collar last night at the kitchen table while his girlfriend Renata watched a novela with the sound low, and him saying, without looking up, *I'll be back late, got a job in Pilsen*, and her saying *you always say that*, not unkind, just true, forty years of women in his family saying it to men in his family.

Your feet find the socks already on them, and the floor beneath — carpet gone thin at the foot of the bed — gives you a knee. Not a metaphor, an actual knee, the left one, thirty years of ladders and crawlspaces and kneeling on concrete pulling conduit, and it throbs low and constant the way it always does at this hour, a debt collected daily. Your lower back answers it a beat later, an old argument between two vertebrae that never settled. This body is fifty-seven and it has been paid for in pieces.

Your right hand, resting now on your thigh, is doing something without asking — the thumbnail worrying at the edge of the index finger, a habit so old it isn't even a decision, Carlos Bautista biting his nails since he was nine years old in a two-flat on Ashland, his mother swatting his hand down at the dinner table for it. The tattoo on the back of that hand catches the lamp — script, a name, a date — and touching it, even just brushing it with your own skin, opens something enormous: a delivery room in 1998, a daughter with too much hair, his wife at the time gray with exhaustion and laughing anyway. The neck holds a second one, older, a name and a year from before any of the kids, from a version of him twenty-something and reckless that the rest of his life slowly sanded down into this — steady, licensed, three kids and a fourth he doesn't talk to as much as he'd like, a girlfriend of six years who does his books because he still can't make himself trust a computer.

The mattress under you, bare box spring at this angle, brings back nothing sweet — just the fact of it, a bed bought secondhand off a guy from the union hall, and a whole marriage that ended somewhere in a house he doesn't live in anymore, no bitterness left in it, just weather that passed. No ex who still occupies any room in him. Only Renata now, down the hall, and the smell of whatever she's got going on the stove, garlic and tomato, threading in under the bedroom door along with the sound of the L. His faith sits in him quiet and specific — a hand that still crosses itself before a job on a hot panel, a mother's church still paid tithe to twice a month out of habit and love both.

The tie finishes itself in your hands, wrong knot, right hands. You stand. The knee complains. The back complains louder. Somewhere in the wallet on the dresser is a photograph he keeps behind his license — three kids at somebody's graduation, squinting into sun — and you haven't touched it yet, but you know it's there the way you know your own pulse now, because his hands know exactly where everything in this room is without looking.

You lift both your hands and turn them over in the lamplight — the tattoos, the bitten nails, the calluses ridged hard across the palms in a pattern no tailor's hands ever earned.

"There you are," you say to no one, to the empty room, to whatever in you is already wondering how long this one holds before the wheel starts feeling like something you owe it again.