Diego Casares

The accountant's office chair does this thing where it sinks half an inch when you lean back, and you've been leaning back in it for eleven minutes now, doing the arithmetic that isn't really arithmetic. Sione Faleolo's hands are on the desk — heavy hands, a wedding ring you never asked about because there's no wife left to ask about, just a habit his fingers have of turning it that you inherited along with everything else. Thirty-seven years old. Six feet, built like a door. You have been him less than an hour and already you know the specific tiredness in his lower back from the commute chair, the tightness behind his eyes from a monitor he keeps too bright. He is fine. He is completely fine, which is the problem — there is nothing left in him to want, no crisis, just Saturday light coming flat through Chicago blinds and a body that runs the way a good appliance runs, without complaint or interest. You spun this one twenty-six times ago, or he was thrown to you, whichever way around it actually works, and you have been sitting inside his competence for a minute now feeling it close over you like water with no current. That's the whole reason, if you're honest, which you don't have to be with anyone. You open the laptop. The wheel loads the way it always loads, patient, gray, waiting.

You spin.

The water glass is under your fingers before you know you have fingers, a quarter-turn of it still travelling, and the sentence is coming out of your mouth already shaped, already halfway gone, someone else's apology finishing itself in a voice that isn't the one you had nine seconds and eleven hundred miles ago. There is a bread basket. There is a girl across the table whose face is doing something careful and closed. There is a light bulb on a bare cord throwing yellow down over both of you, and under it your new hands, brown, younger than the ones you just had, nails a little ragged at the cuticle in a way that reads like a habit, not neglect.

The shirt gets there first. Denim, a wash gone soft at the elbows, and the memory comes up through the fabric the way heat comes up off asphalt — a mirror in a trailer bedroom, this morning, buttoning it one-handed while the other hand found his phone to check the time twice in a minute, a nervousness that lived in his chest before it ever got to his face. He picked this shirt because Marisol said blue once, months ago, in passing, and he remembered. That's Diego. Remembering the small things and then not knowing what to do with his hands once he'd done the remembering.

The earring gives you a year at once — the little silver hoop, cheap, bought at a gas station outside Uvalde on a dare from his cousin, worn every day since because taking it out felt like losing an argument he'd already won. Your left ear tugs faintly at the weight of it, familiar to a body that has worn it eight hundred times and unfamiliar to you completely.

Under the table your leg is going, knee bouncing against the underside of the wood in a rhythm that was running before you arrived and doesn't stop for you either — it is simply what this body does when the mind above it gets anywhere near stillness. You feel the little orange pills in a truck cupholder ten miles from here, a doctor in Uvalde who was patient with him, the relief of a diagnosis after years of thinking he was just built wrong. Treated, mostly. Mostly.

The water glass gives you the whole restaurant — this is the fourth thing he's said wrong tonight, and he can feel her deciding something behind her eyes, and he had wanted, badly, stupidly, for this to go well, had put on the shirt she'd like and said nothing about the twenty minutes he'd spent on his hair that didn't help because it does what it wants regardless. His palms remember the counter at Falcón Meats before that — cold case light, the saw idling down to quiet at five, the clock, the drive over still smelling faintly of blood from under his nails no soap gets all the way out from. Cutting boards. His boss's easy Saturday voice. A trade he's good at and never once chose, the same way he never chose the dimples that show even when he isn't smiling, that people comment on like they're doing him a favor, that Marisol touched once with her thumb on their second date and he'd felt it for an hour after.

There's more — a father who taught him the knife before he taught him to drive, twenty-five thousand dollars sitting quiet in a savings account nobody at this table knows about, a habit of a cigarette on the porch step at eleven each night that is the only ten minutes that belongs only to him — but it's a restaurant table, and there isn't time, and none of it is yours to keep, only to have felt once.

You look down. His hands. Younger, unmarked, faint white scar-lines too fine to be called scars, a leg still going under the table like it never got the message that something enormous just happened above it.

You turn the water glass a quarter turn back, the way it was, the way his memory says he likes it lined up with the fork.

"Sorry," you say, in his voice, to the girl across from you, dimples showing though nothing in you is smiling yet. "Where was I."