Danilo Reyes

The flour is still under Peter Mikulski's nails, and that is the whole problem with him.

You have been him three minutes and already you know the shape of his ceiling: twenty-two years old, up since four, dough under his fingernails no matter how he scrubs, a green-eyed kid who thinks the rest of his life is going to feel this way — small, floury, four in the morning forever. You spun and got a boy who has not lived yet. You are standing in the walk-in cooler of the bakery, his apron still tied, and you already know you are not spending whatever this is on somebody's apprenticeship. He has decades. You have an afternoon and a laptop and a card that says PAY / SPIN. There's a particular flatness to being twenty-two and knowing it will end well — you have felt it before, in other boys, and it bores you the way a sunny forecast bores you. So you go back to the site with his dough-cracked thumb and you spin again, and Pittsburgh keeps baking without you.

He is on his knees when you land, and for a half-second you are nowhere — no cooler, no flour, no Peter at all — and then there is carpet under kneecaps and a bedspread going soft and dark where a forehead just met it, and a voice that isn't yours yet, sliding down off "amen," laughing at itself for finishing too fast. You feel the knees hit the floor a second time before you feel anything else — he'd started to rise, and something in the middle of rising took the legs back down, folded him the rest of the way like a puppet whose strings got picked up by a different hand. The smile goes out of him mid-breath. You arrive in the dark behind his own open eyes, forehead against cheap cotton, hands still knitted together like he never let go.

It is the middle of a Friday afternoon where you came from. It is the middle of the night here, and that wrongness is the first true thing you learn about him — not from a memory yet, just from the dark, the low hum of a plug-in nightlight, the sense that this room is built for two a.m., not two p.m. He is a man who prays at hours nobody's watching.

You lift your head off the bedspread and the room tells you nothing yet — it's the hands that start it. Your fingers are still laced. The right thumb finds the pad of the left thumb the way it must do a thousand times a day, worrying at a hangnail nobody taught it to worry, and that small motion cracks something open: cuticles picked raw on cold mornings kneeling at strangers' doors, a habit older than the ring on the fourth finger. The ring itself is next — plain, warm from his own skin — and it comes with a full church, incense, a woman in cream lace and her mother crying happy-mad in the second pew, and his own hands shaking so bad setting the ring that the priest had to steady his wrist. Isabella. You didn't know the name until the ring gave it to you, and then the forearm gives you the rest — script and a date, done six years after the wedding because money for the tattoo took that long to come free, her name because she asked once, half-joking, if he'd ever get her name on him like the tough guys did, and he'd said only if she meant it, and she'd meant it.

The t-shirt against your back gives you the morning before this one — not this morning, an ordinary one, the two of them interchangeable in his memory the way most mornings are: him pulling this exact gray shirt over his head in a bathroom with the fan too loud, Isabella's toothbrush going at the same time in the mirror, her hip bumping his out of habit and not romance, comfortable as furniture. The jacket on its hook by the door gives you keys — actual keys, a fan of brass and nickel clipped to a zipper pocket, and with them a whole trade: kneeling at storefront grates before the city's awake, a cylinder warm from a torch held in his palm, the particular satisfaction of a tumbler giving up its five pins one at a time under his pick like it was always going to. He is good at getting into things that don't want to open. He has never once thought of that as funny about himself.

The knees ache — bad, older-man bad for thirty-five, a mason's-kneeler ache from a decade of storefronts and basements. The shoulders are wider than Peter's ever were, filled out with the specific tiredness of a body that lifts and kneels and climbs ladders for a living and has stopped noticing it does. A pack of cigarettes lives in a jacket pocket somewhere outside this room; the want for one arrives faintly, a low background hum, though his hands right now would rather pick at themselves than reach for it. He has never had a drink in his life and there's a small clean pride folded into that, something his mother used to say out loud at parties that used to embarrass him and now doesn't.

The prayer itself — you get that too, thin and unserious the way he does it most nights, more habit than faith, mumbled fast so he can get back under the blanket before the room cools further — Isabella asleep already, an early call in the morning, a lock uptown that's been sticking and a landlord who wants it fixed before Monday. Nothing large. Nothing he'd tell anyone about later. That's the whole of him surfacing at once: ordinary, married nine — no, six years, married and easy in it, no children yet and no hurry about it that you can feel, a man who kneels at his own bed a little embarrassed to be caught even by himself.

You unlace the fingers. You turn the left hand over first, ring catching the nightlight, then the right, thumbnail bitten short, cuticle red at one corner where he'd been at it in his sleep probably, and you lift your eyes off your own hand into the dark of the room like there's a lens in it.

"Isabella?" you say, quiet, testing the shape of the name in his mouth, not sure yet if you mean it as a question for her or for yourself — how long you'll be the man who gets to say it.