Douglas Pinsker

You are eighteen minutes and change from a full night's tattoo appointments, standing in a body you have owned for exactly two minutes, and it already itches.

Manny Cisneros's hands are good hands — you can feel that immediately, the calluses along the first two fingers, the steadiness of them, a boy who was somebody before you got here and is nothing now. The dimples. The blue eyes catching the shop's fluorescent light in the mirror over the sink. You spun for him last night wanting something young and easy and pretty, and you got it, and it was everything advertised for exactly two minutes, and then it wasn't enough, the way nothing ever quite finishes being enough, and that's the whole reason you keep a hand on the wheel at all. Two minutes is not very long to know you're bored. It is long enough, apparently, for you.

You don't examine it further than that. You never do. You open the site on his phone with his thumbprint, feel his heart do something small and fast that isn't yours, and you spin.

The bench meets your palm before anything else does — cool, padded, canvas-smell and old varnish and something chemical underneath, linseed maybe, and your hand is flat on your own chest, feeling ribs that are not the ribs you had a second ago. Shorter reach. Heavier through the middle. A ponytail's weight dragging faintly at the nape when you turn your head, which you do, because the head is new and it wants to know where it is.

North light. A brownstone's worth of quiet outside a window you haven't looked at yet. A shirt on your back, buttoned wrong by one, and your hand goes to the top button without you deciding to send it there — undoes it, works down, redoes it right, and ties the tie hanging loose around your collar into a four-in-hand your fingers seem to know better than you do, some other man's fingers underneath yours making the choice while you watch.

The shirt gives it up first, the way shirts do — the cotton against your shoulder blades delivering, without asking, a Tuesday eleven years back, this same closet smell, a woman's voice from the bathroom saying something about the Henderson triptych coming in Thursday and could he please not wear the blue with it, he always wears the blue with everything, and you feel the specific fondness of a man being teased by his wife before you feel anything else about her at all. Her name arrives a half-breath later — Carol — folded into the memory like it was never separate from it.

The tie against your throat gives you a different one: a rehearsal dinner, this same knot tied by somebody else's hands, his father's, seventeen years ago, his father's breath smelling like scotch and his father saying you'll do fine, which had not been about the tie.

Your feet, still bare on the bedroom floor, remember cold hardwood in a fourth-floor walk-up that isn't this apartment, a girl named Renata asleep in the next room and him standing exactly like this, half-dressed, deciding not to wake her before a shift neither of them could afford for him to miss. That was a decade before Carol. He still thinks about her sometimes at the sink, unbidden, the way you think about your own bad ideas. It costs him something small and private and he never says a word about it to anyone, least of all to Carol, and now it costs you too, briefly, secondhand, like inheriting someone's low-grade guilt along with his shoe size.

The wedding band is cool and unremarkable and it opens nothing on its own, but the finger it sits on remembers a hospital chair, two of them, four years apart, a nurse handing him something wrapped and furious and red, and the specific fear of being handed the most breakable thing he would ever hold. His hands — your hands, now — already know how to hold canvas the same way: like it will not forgive you for dropping it. Forty-one years old, and the body carries it plainly — the low ache already sitting in the lower back before the day has even started, the strength banked thick through the shoulders and gut from lifting frames he shouldn't lift alone, the tattoo at his collar he got on a bad night at twenty-three and has spent eighteen years wishing gone, small and blurred and never once explained to Carol, who has never asked.

You finish the knot. The shirt sits right. Somewhere under the collarbone the old tattoo he regrets sits like a word he'd like to take back and can't.

You look down at your hands — his hands, blunt-fingered, paint under one nail he missed at the sink last night, the wedding band catching the window light — and you turn them over slowly, palm up, like they might tell you something they haven't already.

Then you lift your eyes to find whatever's watching, because something always is, and you say, quiet, almost to yourself:

"Which one of us is late for work?"