Dale Ferriday

The mower shed smells like cut grass and gasoline, and you have been standing in its doorway for four minutes doing nothing, which is the whole problem. You are Cody Restrepo, nineteen, and your knees are good and your back doesn't hurt and none of that matters because the riding mower's transmission slipped again this morning and the property manager stood over you talking slow like you were the machine that was broken. You have been him for less than a minute the first time and fifty-five bodies since, and somewhere in the stacking of all those men you learned this feeling has a name: not boredom exactly, more like standing in a doorway you already know the far side of. Nineteen forever if you let it. You wipe your palm on your green shirt, and the fabric doesn't even feel like your day yet, it feels like a rental. You go inside, sit on the cot, pull up the site on a cracked phone screen. The wheel is already spinning by the time you've decided anything.

Water is running somewhere near your feet before you know you have feet, and there is a sponge fat with suds in your right hand and a car door in front of you the color of a bruise, and your arm is already dragging a slow wide arc across the panel out of a motion that started before you got here. Thumb tucked. Wrist turning small circles. Behind you, for the first time all afternoon, the swirl marks in the soap don't finish — because you finished them different, tighter, older.

The shirt is what gets you first — thin cotton stuck to your back with sweat and hose-mist, and through it, faint, a small hard weight at the chest that makes no sense to you until an afternoon fifteen years gone comes up out of nowhere: a tattoo parlor on Telephone Road, a dare from a woman named Renee who is long since somebody else's wife now, the sting of the needle and her laughing at how still you held. The piercing throbbed for a week and she loved it and that, more than the metal, is what the shirt remembers.

The ring finger tells you something the shirt can't. There's no weight on it, hasn't been in three years, but the skin still knows the shape of what used to sit there — paler, softer, a groove worn into forty-something years of otherwise weathering the same as everything else on this hand. Divorce papers on a kitchen table you don't own anymore. Three kids — no, more than three, you feel the extra weight of it without a number attaching, birthdays scattered across a calendar you keep in your head because you're bad with the physical one. Child support that eats the boat money before the boat money exists. An ex you still call sometimes, not the wife — before her, a girl from Baytown whose name arrives soft and unguarded, Carla, nineteen years old the summer you had her and fifty-one now thinking of her while soap runs down a stranger's rocker panel that isn't a stranger's, it's yours, Saturday, driveway, this is what Saturday is for.

Your feet remember the boat before they remember the driveway — a rhythm of deck under rubber boots at four in the morning, nets slick and heavy, diesel and gull-scream and the particular ache of a lower back that has hauled line since he was seventeen. This body is short and thick through the middle in a way that has nothing to do with weakness; the forearms know knots the way your mouth knows a name. There's a dull hum behind the sternum that isn't panic, just the diabetes, a low tax paid every hour whether he thinks about it or not, and a leg that has already started bouncing though the man is standing still, some motor in him that never fully cuts off.

The shirt again, cotton against the shoulder blades, gives you this morning whole: waking without an alarm because the body doesn't need one anymore, standing in the bedroom of a house with a bed too big for one man, pulling the shirt over his head one arm and then the other, feeling for the pierced nipple through fabric out of habit like checking a wallet's still there, stepping into cargo shorts because it's Saturday and Saturday is car-washing and church tomorrow and nobody home to see either. He said a small prayer getting dressed, the kind that isn't words so much as posture, thanking nobody in particular for another one. He hasn't had a cigarette yet today, and some animal under the ribs is already asking. He lit his first one seventeen years old on a shrimp boat off Palacios and has never stopped since, pack a day, steady as tide.

You look at your hands. Freckled, thick-fingered, soap drying pale on the knuckles, and one of them still doesn't know what to do with the empty place where a ring should be. You lift your eyes off it, into whatever's watching — the garage door, the driveway, the whole ordinary Houston afternoon that belongs to nobody now but you.

"There you are," you say, to the hand, or to him, or to nobody.