Colin Beauparlant

The store office smells like burnt coffee and floor cleaner, and Mateo Rangel's hands — your hands, for three minutes now — are flat on the desk where the schedule won't balance. Western Kansas light comes low and orange through the blinds, end-of-day light, and somewhere out past the stockroom a kid is asking where the mop bucket went. You have had this body three minutes and you already know its headache, the eyebrow scar that aches faintly when he frowns, the particular tiredness of a man who manages people for a living and resents it a little more each year. It isn't bad. It isn't anything. That's the problem — you took him on a whim and he turns out to be just a Thursday, same as the one you were trying to leave. You get your phone out, thumb already knowing the site, the wheel already turning in your head before it turns on the screen. Not boredom exactly. Hunger for a different kind of quiet.

The screen flashes. The office is gone.

You are sitting. That's the first thing — weight dropped into cushions, a couch giving under hips wider than the ones you just had, a body gone soft in the middle, comfortable with itself. A remote is loose in your right hand, rubber buttons worn smooth under the pad of your thumb. The television light is moving blue and restless across a dim room, and then the show cuts to something bright — a window blown out white in whatever movie this is — and you feel your own spine straighten against the couch back like it was called to attention. You set the remote down on the arm of the couch, slow, deliberate, a man adjusting himself without knowing why. On screen something is probably funny. You do not laugh.

The shirt is flannel, unbuttoned over a soft gray tee, and the first thing it gives you is the smell of cedar and salt that lives in this house permanently, and with the smell comes a hand — his hand — buttoning it that morning, cold fingers, cold air coming through a cracked window because the woodstove hadn't caught yet. Colin Beauparlant. The name arrives the way his own name always arrives to a man, without announcement, just there. Thirty-eight-hour haul up from Bangor two days ago, empty tank of a truck parked three streets over at the co-op lot because his driveway's too short to turn it. The cap is still on the hook by the door, not on his head, because indoors a man takes his hat off even when nobody's watching.

The sweatpants against your legs remember the shower before this, remember a day spent half-asleep catching up on sleep debt the road always takes back double. Bare feet on the carpet bring the cold floor of a house built before anybody cared about insulation, bring the dooryard outside full of stacked traps waiting on a season, bring his father's voice from some July telling him buoys don't paint themselves. He never fished for a living. He drives instead, up and down 95 and the turnpike, hauling freight for money that fishing stopped reliably making decades back, and some nights that feels like a loss and some nights it feels like nothing at all.

The tattoo on the arm — eagle, banner, faded reds going pink, bold black lines softening at the edges — came from a shop in Bangor the week he turned twenty-one, and under your skin it carries the sting of the needle and the friend who got the matching one and moved to Tennessee three years ago and never calls. The couch itself, worn leather-look fabric gone shiny at the headrest, gives you a girl's weight that isn't there anymore — Hannah, eight months gone, who used to put her feet in his lap right here, right in this spot, and the absence of that weight is its own small ache, duller now than it was, not gone.

His body: thirty-eight-hour hauls sit in the lower back permanently, a dull persistent complaint. Hands know rope and ratchet straps and the particular give of a fifth wheel locking in, muscle memory that doesn't belong to you and arrived anyway, lodged in the forearms. He's soft through the middle, the kind of soft that comes from gas station coffee and meals eaten sitting down in a cab, but the shoulders under the flannel are thick, used to hauling and chaining and the work before the driving even starts. A gap between his front teeth that his tongue finds without thinking, worrying at it the way some men chew a pen. He's twenty-five and feels it in the easy slouch of him and older than that in the low back and the quiet.

You look down. The remote sits where he — where you — set it on the arm of the couch, and your hand beside it looks nothing like the hand that held it a minute before your own history began layering over his. Fingers thicker, a tattoo's faded wing just visible where the sleeve's pushed up. You turn the hand over once, like checking it's real, like checking it's yours now, the gap in your teeth showing when your mouth opens.

"Huh," you say, to the empty dark room, to no one, to the television still playing something you are no longer watching. "Didn't think that'd be funny."