Cody Restrepo

The clinic smells like antiseptic and wet dog even on the good days, and today is not a good day. You are Mark Delvecchio, thirty-two, and you have just told a woman her cat is not going to make it past the weekend, and she has looked at you like you personally arranged it. You washed your hands three times after and the soap didn't do anything about the look on her face. It's Saturday, midday, and the waiting room is full and will stay full, and somewhere under the fluorescent hum you feel the old itch start up — the one that has nothing to do with the cat or the woman, the one that just wants to not be anyone's disappointed face to look at for a while. You had this body less than a minute before you decided you'd use it to open the site again. That's the joke of it. You didn't even get comfortable. You take the phone out in the supply closet, thumb already knowing the way, and you spin.

There is rain on your face before there is anything else — before there is a you to have a face. Cold rain, driving down, and your head is tipped back into it, hood shoved off, and the water is running into your collar and you are not flinching from it. Your feet are in runoff over the tops of your boots. Somewhere above and behind, a sign is counting down a bus that is no longer any part of your plans. You feel nineteen in your knees before you feel it anywhere else — that particular unbruised looseness — and you feel the weight of boots that have stood in wet grass since six this morning.

The jacket is the first thing that talks to you, its wet nylon dragging cold against your wrists, and it gives you the walk to the stop an hour ago, the last mow of the day already behind you, fresh stripes drying dark and light across the outfield until the sky opened up and ruined the pattern you'd been proud of for exactly four minutes. You get the field before you get the man — the specific left-handed hush of a mower engine, the smell of cut grass gone sweet and a little rotten in the heat, the stands empty enough that you talked to yourself out there and didn't feel stupid about it. Freckles itch faintly under the rain, an old sun-thing, and you know without being told that someone teases you about them, softly, the way you tease someone back.

The shirt under the jacket — you don't feel it yet, it's dry, folded somewhere in a duffel — but the memory of putting it on this morning comes anyway, riding in sideways on the smell of laundry detergent still faint in the collar: standing in a pastel-walled bedroom with the balcony door cracked, ocean haze coming in flat and white, easing one arm into the sleeve while your phone buzzed on the nightstand with a good-morning text you didn't answer fast enough. Her name doesn't arrive whole, just the shape of her annoyance and then her laugh forgiving you for it thirty seconds later, the two of you good at that particular rhythm. There's another shape behind that one, older, quieter — a woman who isn't in the texts anymore, whose leaving still sits in you like a bruise you check without meaning to, press just to see if it still hurts. It does, a little. You let it go.

Your hands are nineteen-year-old hands, callused across the palm in the particular pattern of a mower handle held too tight on the first pass and looser by the last, a thin white line of old blister-scar tissue that isn't a scar exactly, just work. They know how to check a blade height without looking, how to coil a hose so it doesn't kink, how to wave at the same three old men who watch the Little League games from the same bleacher seats. Your knees are good. Your lower back has the specific ache of a nineteen-year-old who's been bending over sprinkler heads since sunrise, which is not the same as being tired, just used. You are standing in water past your ankles and you have not moved to get out of it, and some part of him — the last of him, going now — liked the rain, liked standing in it, felt something almost holy about being rained on after a day of making grass look perfect for people who'd never say thank you.

You look down at your hands. Rain sits in the lines of them, in the small white scar-that-isn't at the base of the thumb. You turn them over slowly, like you're checking they're still attached, and freckled water drips off the knuckles.

"Whole different bus," you say, out loud, to nobody, and laugh once, short, up into the rain — and you don't look away from where the lens would be, if there were one, and somewhere very far off in a supply closet in New York a man named Mark is standing empty with a phone still warm in his hand, and you have absolutely no plans to go back and tell him what he missed.