Curtis Hollenbeck

The Mateo body is still warm from the shop, and I am sitting in his truck with a wrench-oil smell in the knuckles when I decide. His thumb has a split in it that opens whenever I make a fist. I make a fist. Twenty-six years old, five-five, a gap in the teeth I keep touching with my tongue. A good body. It does what it's told. But it has been mine for less than a minute, and already I know every bolt on it, and I am tired of it the way you tire of a word said too many times. The page is open. The wheel is a picture of a wheel. I press, and Mateo goes out of his own hands like water out of a cupped palm.

Concrete under the balls of the feet. A hum overhead, high and steady, in the teeth. I am crouched, and my thighs are already complaining, because this weight is not the one I just had. It is heavier, rounder, lower to the ground. One sock hangs from my right hand, black, still warm, and the dryer breathes its hot cotton breath into my face.

The sock first. Wool blend, the heel gone thin. A kitchen, a small girl standing on a chair, holding up two socks that don't match and laughing like it's the best joke in Ohio. His joke. He let her win it. His chest goes soft around it, and the softness is not mine, and I let it be there.

The shirt against my back is cotton, navy, washed so many times it has gone slack. This morning: he sat on the edge of a bed with his knees apart and pulled it over his head, arm by arm, the left sleeve catching on the band of his ring. Gray sweatpants after, the drawstring knotted because the knot never comes out. Quiet in the house. A woman still asleep, one bare shoulder out of the blanket, and he stood over her a second longer than he needed to. Then the stairs, which creak at the fourth step, and he steps over it without looking.

The tattoo itches. I don't need to see it. Thirteen years ago, a hot gravel yard, a sergeant with a voice like a dropped tray, and the pride of belonging to something that didn't care whether he did. His leg is bouncing. It has been bouncing since I got here, the heel going against the floor, and I realize I can't stop it and don't want to.

I pull the load out, a thick damp-warm armful, and drop it in the basket. My hands start folding before I ask them. Shirt, shake, sleeves in, the corners squared with two flat strokes of the palm. Fast. Exact. The Army in the fingers. Upstairs the drawer is full of crumpled shirts, I know that without knowing how, and he will never fold those, only these, down here, where nobody sees how well he does it. A foundry floor, orange light, ladle tipping, sweat running into his eyes. A man he hasn't called in eleven years, a girl on a porch in a yellow dress. Money, always the money, a number he carries behind his eyes like a stone in a boot. And Sunday, a bench, a hymn, his voice cracking on the high note and nobody minding.

My knees ache. My belly rests on my thighs. My cheeks are smooth, shaved this morning, and a little sore.

I lift my right hand and turn it over. Wide palm, blunt fingers, a pale line of ring on the left. Freckles run down to the knuckles. I close it. It closes.

I look up at the dark, at the tube light, at nothing.

"Well," I say, and the voice is lower than I expected, and kind. "Hello, Curtis."

The sock is still in my hand. How long will I hold it? Until the wanting comes back, or the afternoon ends, or sooner. I fold the sock.