Colton Vandermeer

Jerome Wallace's hands won't stop shaking, and it's not the hangover.

You're standing in his kitchen in the gray before sunrise, a cup of coffee going cold on the counter because Jerome can't hold it steady enough to drink it, and you know already this body is done for you. Five hours and forty-eight minutes of him. Long enough to feel it in the wrists first — this fine, constant tremor that isn't yours, that was already running in him like current before you arrived and will keep running after you leave, because it was never about you. Long enough to have gone out to the job site yesterday evening in his skin, to have felt twenty-two years old and skinny-fat and always a little cold, to have poured concrete with hands that jumped on the trowel. You didn't take him for the tremor. You didn't take him for anything specific. He was just there when the wheel stopped, the way they all are. But he came with a flaw already in him, a small failure of the nervous system that has nothing to do with you and that you are, this Saturday morning, tired of wearing. That's the truth of it, unglamorous: you got bored inside a man who couldn't hold his coffee cup, and you want to feel something else's hands work right for once.

So you open the site again. Vessel.cards, the wheel already loaded from last night, and Jerome's thumb — twitching, always twitching — taps to spin.

—

The room is not this room. It smells like old plaster and cold radiator dust, and there's a rug under you patterned in rust and cream, worn soft in a path that isn't from your footsteps. Your legs are crossed under you. There's a book open across your knees, water-stained, its spine cracked white along the fold, and your mouth is already moving — has been moving — around a word that does not belong to English, and the second time through the line it comes out right, easy, like a key finding its groove, and you finish the sentence without looking down to check it.

Your hands are steady on the page. That's the first thing. Rock steady, both of them, one flat against the paper and one holding the book's edge, and you feel that steadiness like a gift you didn't ask for and don't yet understand.

—

The flannel shirt is what opens first, worn soft at the elbows, and it comes with a memory of a body colder than this room — a body that runs warm naturally, an easy 98.6 that never sweats standing still, unlike the one you just left. Colton Vandermeer. The name arrives with the shirt's collar against your neck, the way a name arrives when you've heard it said by your own mother a thousand times, half-exasperated, half-fond. Colton. Twenty-four. There's a lockbox somewhere in a truck outside — no, not this weekend, that's tomorrow's memory bleeding backward, Monday's open house on Cedar Street, a wheat field cut down to yellow stubble behind the FOR SALE sign and a thunderhead stacked up black on the horizon like a fist. You feel the porch boards through boots you're not wearing right now. You feel the lockbox's cold combination wheel under a thumb that, in that memory, does not shake at all — his hands are steady, always have been, the one clean thing about him he's never had to think twice about.

The boots you ARE wearing come next, laced this morning — no, some morning, folded into the muscle memory of a hundred identical mornings — brown leather, broken in at the ankle, the left one always a half-size looser from a summer of walking foreclosures in July heat. Jeans worn through at one knee, not fashion, just years. The studs in your ears are cold circles of memory all their own: a girl in Garden City who pierced them for him with a sewing needle and a lighter when he was seventeen, laughing so hard she nearly missed, and how he wore them ever since because it was the only reckless thing he'd ever let himself do.

The rug under you gives up an afternoon: him finding this apartment two years ago, this second-floor unit above a shuttered hardware store in a town not big enough to have a real downtown, the landlord throwing the rug in because nobody else wanted it. Sunday afternoons alone here with a cigarette out the window because his mother would smell it on the church clothes otherwise. A pack a day, easy, and the taste of it is in the back of your throat now, phantom and familiar. Big nights out once or twice a month at the one bar in three counties, karaoke and truck beds and a girl he almost called back and never did, because nobody in this life has mattered enough yet to change the shape of it.

The book is the deepest thing here, and it gives the most. He found it in a dead client's house, an estate sale nobody else wanted to work, boxes of a widow's junk in a falling-down farmhouse past the county line, and something about the water damage on the cover made him take it home instead of leaving it for the dumpster. He'd told himself it was just old, just interesting, the kind of thing you keep on a shelf to look worldly. He had not told himself, sitting down cross-legged on this rug an hour ago — no, some hour, folding now into this one — that he intended to read the whole page aloud. He had not told himself why the words felt so good in his mouth once he started, why the stammer on the third line dissolved on the second try like something remembering how to walk. That part isn't a memory. That part is you, now, in his mouth, finishing a page he never gets to understand he started.

His job aches in your shoulders anyway — the particular fatigue of standing on porches making small talk about square footage, smiling through commission math that barely covers the truck payment, the loneliness of being twenty-four and liked well enough by everyone and truly known by no one in a county with more grain elevators than stoplights. Mainline Protestant, quietly, more out of his mother's habit than his own conviction — a pew every few Sundays, hands folded in a way that, unlike now, still trembled faintly against the wood.

You feel all twenty-four years of him settle into your chest like weather, and under it, running the whole time, small and unbothered: his hands. Steady. Not shaking at all.

—

You lift your right hand off the book and hold it up in the gray morning light coming through the window, turn it over once, palm to knuckle, watching it do nothing — no tremor, no jump, just quiet obedient stillness, and something in you that isn't him and isn't quite you either wants to laugh at how good that feels.

You look up, into the middle distance where a phone would be if there were one, and say, out loud, to no one:

"Well — that's better."