Dale Furbish

Warren Renshaw's hands smell like diesel and someone else's bad decisions, and you have had enough of both. You're sitting in the cab of his truck at a strip-mall lot in Detroit, gray light through a windshield gone milky with age, the white streak in his hair catching the visor mirror every time you glance at it. It's not a bad body. Strong back, easy laugh you've heard from other men in his phone contacts, a chin that women seem to like. But you have been him less than a minute and already the ceiling of him is visible — the busted knuckle that never healed right, the guy on hold about a repossession he can't afford to lose, forty years old and already telling himself this is as far as it goes. You didn't spin six hundred and thirteen times to sit still. You open the site on his phone with his own thick thumb, the wheel already spinning before you've decided anything, because deciding was never really the part you do anymore. It lands.

You are face-down in sheets that are not Warren's sheets, in a room that smells like fabric softener and something staler underneath it, and the first thing you know is the ache — deep, low, along the spine, a old-man throb that has nothing to do with the arm hanging off the mattress into a bar of gray streetlight. The breath under you goes from ragged to even in the space of one inhale you didn't take on purpose. The arm draws itself up. You feel the shoulder do it, feel the elbow bend on its own accounting, hands coming together at the chest like a man laid out for a viewing, and some part of this body that isn't you anymore flinches at the wrongness of the posture and is silenced immediately, all the way down, gone.

Sawdust. That's the first real thing that arrives, riding in on the smell of the pillow — sawdust and cut pine and the particular grit of a job site at seven a.m., except it isn't seven a.m., it's the wrong side of eleven and the curtains are heavy for a reason. Night crew. Framing a strip-mall build-out on a schedule that only makes sense to a man dodging the Houston heat, working the dark hours because the permits demand it and because sleep, whenever it comes, comes broken anyway. The tool belt on the chair by the door gives you his hands — not your hands, his, remembering how a hammer sits, how a nail gun kicks, thirty years of knowing where his fingers are without looking so he never once, not once, took one off.

The gray T-shirt balled at the foot of the bed remembers the morning he put it on, except mornings for him start at dusk: pulling it over his head in a kitchen with the light off so he wouldn't wake anyone, except there's nobody left to wake, hasn't been in three years, and his hand still checks the empty side of the closet out of habit before catching itself. The ring finger — you feel the tan line before you feel anything else about the hand, a pale stripe where sixteen years used to sit, and with it comes an afternoon in a lawyer's office that smelled like coffee gone cold, her voice level in the way that hurt worse than shouting would have, and two kids in a car in the parking lot who didn't know yet that this was the day it ended for good. He drove to a job site straight after. Framed a wall. Didn't tell the crew.

The tattoo on his arm — tribal, half-covered by the sleeve — comes with heat and a bar in Galveston and being twenty-six and invincible, before the back went, before the knees started sending bills. Now the back never stops sending them; it's the low hum under everything, the reason he sleeps face down some nights just to get pressure off it, the reason there's a toothpick on the nightstand he'll reach for the second he's conscious, jaw already wanting the work of it though he never smoked a day and never drank one either, his mother's church voice still in him somewhere saying that's not what the Lord gave you a body for. He believes that, mostly. He believes a lot of things mostly.

The kids come last and stay longest — a daughter's graduation photo he keeps in his wallet gone soft at the corner, a son's voice on the phone last Sunday, careful and kind in the way of a grown child checking on a father he loves and worries has nothing else. Dale doesn't tell them about the back. Dale doesn't tell them much of anything. He tells the wall studs, and the toothpick, and sometimes, at this hour, the ceiling.

You feel his hands first — the strength still in them despite the ache riding underneath, a working man's hands, callused where a level and a saw handle have lived for three decades. You bring them up in front of your face in the gray streetlight and turn them over, and there's a beat where the body wants to recognize them and can't, because you're the one behind the eyes now and the eyes are Dale Furbish's but the looking is yours.

"There you are," you say, to nobody, to the empty side of the bed, to whoever might be listening on the other end of six hundred and fourteen spins — and you don't know yet if that's a hello or a goodbye, or how long you get to find out.