Dominic Fabre

Vincent Halloran's kitchen smells like burnt coffee and the radiator that never shuts off. You have been him for forty-some seconds, standing at his counter in the cardigan he apparently sleeps in half the day, and already you know the whole shape of what's wrong with this one: the silence. No wife anymore, no kids who call before six p.m., a corkboard by the fridge with a grandson's school photo curling at the corner and nothing pinned near it that's new. Freckled hands, spotted with age, shaking faintly with a tremor that isn't yours and that you didn't ask for. Sixty-one years of somebody else's disappointment sitting in a body that creaks when it reaches for the sugar. You spun for a reason once, some other day, some other want, and you got this — a man with money in the bank and nothing in his calendar. You did not come back to the wheel for him. You came back because his hands shake and his knees complain on the stairs and there is a particular flavor of loneliness in this apartment that has nothing to do with the body and everything to do with the four seconds it takes to decide you don't want to spend the afternoon inside it. The site loads on the tablet propped against the toaster. You do not think about who's on the other end. You never do. You touch the wheel.

Heat, first — real heat, wet and heavy, nothing like Queens in any season. Then weight: more of it, packed into shoulders and forearms that know something about carrying lumber. A vibration walks up through your palm before your palm knows it's yours, the tool still hissing on its trigger half a beat past when it should have stopped. Your — his — hand corrects. One nail sinks crooked into the stud, kicked in low and wrong, and the next motion comes slow, deliberate, checked, the way a man checks something he hasn't had to check since he was nineteen. Sun is directly overhead. Steam is coming off the wet street behind you in a thin rope, evaporating off asphalt that got rained on an hour ago and is now cooking. There's a green shotgun house at your back, one room wide, and banana leaves nodding over a fence, and none of it is anything you've stood in front of before.

It comes in through the tool belt first — the worn leather at your hips, low-slung, familiar in a way that isn't yours but insists — and with it a smell: sawdust, two-cycle exhaust, the particular mildew-sweetness of a New Orleans job site in the wet months. Dominic Fabre. The name arrives with the belt buckle, oddly, the way his thumb runs along it out of habit before it does anything else. Fifteen years a carpenter, eight of them on his own crew. The nail gun's grip is worn smooth in a shape his palm made himself, one thumb-groove polished pale where the safety sits, and holding it gives you an afternoon — not a memory exactly, a whole rhythm: hundreds of walls just like this one, framed on slabs just like this one, in a city that never lets a slab stay dry for long. His shoulders know the weight of the hose dragging behind him before his mind does. He doesn't love the work, particularly, but his hands do, the way you love a language you learned as a child and never had to think about again.

The plaid shirt against your back gives you a morning: him buttoning it in a bedroom with the ceiling fan already on, humidity making the collar stick before he's even outside, his wife's voice from the next room asking if he took his vape off the nightstand or if it was still charging, and him saying something back that wasn't really an answer, just a sound married people make instead of words. Two kids' voices somewhere further off, cartoons too loud. He remembers — you remember, wearing him — the wedding band going on cold that morning the way it does every morning, an unconscious little twist of the finger to settle it, fifteen years of that same twist. Catholic guilt threading through it lightly: mass on Sunday, missed more than attended lately, a rosary somewhere in a truck's glovebox that he touches sometimes without praying. He quit drinking around the time the second kid was born, doesn't miss it most days, misses it a little on days like this when the heat sits on his chest like a hand. Money is not the thing he worries about — the business is doing fine, better than fine — but his hands worry anyway, an old habit: put him on the spot, ask him to speak in front of people, and they stutter, tap, fidget, useless independent of him, the same as they've always been since he was a boy called on in class. Nobody at the job site would guess that about him. He hides it in work. Work never stutters.

The nose comes through last, strange and specific — a flash of pain that isn't pain anymore, just information: broken in his twenties in a bar fight nobody remembers the reason for, set slightly crooked by a doctor who didn't care much, and he stopped minding it around the time his wife told him she liked it, that it made his face look lived-in. He believes her, mostly. Forty years old and the gray is coming in faster than the dye job admits, roots pushing through at the part, and some nights he catches himself in the truck mirror and doesn't recognize the tired thing looking back — and doesn't mind that either, not really. He has two kids and a wife and a business and a slab of wet concrete steaming under a hot sun, and until four seconds ago that was the whole of what he had to think about.

You look down. The nail gun is still in your grip, hose curled behind you like something sleeping, and your hand — his hand, wide-knuckled, a white line of old callus along the trigger finger — turns over in the light, palm up, like you're checking it for something that isn't there. Steam lifts off the street beyond the framed wall. You lift your eyes to find whatever's watching, and you say, quiet, almost like you're telling him instead of anyone else:

"Didn't feel that one coming."