Dennis Kahale

You are Cody Van Sant for the thirty-ninth minute, standing behind a bar in a town whose name you already can't be bothered to remember, and the problem with Cody is that Cody is bored. Not unhappy — bored, which is worse, because unhappy at least gives you something to spin away from. The bar is dead. There's a game on with the sound off. Your hazel eyes — his eyes, you keep forgetting which — catch your reflection in the register glass and it's a twenty-year-old face that hasn't done anything yet and isn't going to before close. You already know the taste of this one. You want something with weight to it. You want a man whose arms tell you he's lived through something instead of toward it. You take out the phone under the bar, thumb the site open again, and the wheel is already spinning before you've decided to let it.

The couch takes your weight before you know it's your weight. It exhales under you, an old cushion giving up a decade of shape all at once. The room is dark except the television, throwing blue and white across a hand that is not the hand you had a second ago — thick-knuckled, freckled up the back, a wedding band catching the light — and a remote that this hand knows exactly how to hold without looking. Somewhere behind your sternum something catches on the inhale, small and habitual, like a held door. On the screen the show cuts to a bright frame. You feel your own spine straighten without asking it to. Whatever was funny half a second ago isn't anymore.

The shirt is what opens first — plain cotton, gone soft in the way cotton goes soft on a body that sweats through it and washes it too many times, and putting it on this morning comes back to you sleeve by sleeve: Dennis standing in the graying dark of a bedroom in a house up on posts, wife still asleep behind him, easing his right arm through first because the sleeve always catches on Sarah's name, on the date under it, 1966, his mother's birth year inked there for a woman who never left the islands and never asked him to explain himself to anyone. He'd looked at it in the mirror the way he looks at it every morning, not reading it, just checking it's still there. He'd gone down to the kitchen in the tin-roof light and eaten toast standing at the counter because sitting felt like wasting the last quiet minutes before the van came for the crew change. Three kids gone from the house now, one still calling every Sunday about money, and Sarah — the actual, present Sarah, the wife — asleep down the hall with the fan going, and somewhere behind that a girl he was twenty with, a name that still surfaces sometimes on nights he can't sleep, no malice in it, just a door he never fully closed before he found the one he stayed in.

The wedding band is warm from his skin. Thirty-one years wearing it and his hand has forgotten it's there except when it isn't. The chest under your borrowed shirt is heavier than Cody's, soft in the middle the way a man goes soft after decades of shift meals and no time to walk it off, and there's a catch low in the lungs that isn't pain exactly, just a tightness that means don't run today, an inhaler somewhere in a jacket pocket he hasn't reached for in weeks because he manages without it more than he should. His jaw works at nothing — a toothpick that isn't there right now, and the muscle memory of chewing one anyway, worn into him from twenty years of quitting cigarettes that he never actually quit, one pack a day, patient as tide. The couch under you knows this body's exact slouch. The remote in your hand is heavier than you expect, and his thumb, not yours, already knows which button does what without your having to look.

There's a rig out past the horizon that this body has stood on a hundred times, derrick going up into white glare, gloves stiff with drilling mud, the particular ache between the shoulder blades that comes from thirty years of a job that pays what it pays because it takes what it takes. There's a paycheck that let him buy the house on posts outright, that lets Sarah not work if she doesn't want to, money that sits comfortable and unspoken the way money sits when a man earned it slow instead of found it. None of that is in the room right now. What's in the room right now is early morning, gray coming up outside a window you haven't turned to look at yet, a wife asleep, a house not yet awake, a television he was watching alone because sleep wasn't coming and it was easier than lying there listening to his own chest.

You look down. Freckles across the back of a hand you don't recognize as any hand you've had before. The ring catches light from the screen. You turn it over once, feel the give of soft knuckles, the small tremor of a smoker's morning hand.

"Hell," you say, quiet, to no one, in a voice pitched low and gravel-worn that isn't yours yet either, "when'd I get old."

You don't look away from your own hand for a long moment. Then you do, up into the blue light, and you hold there, and you don't know yet how long you get to keep him.