Dwayne Setliff

The espresso machine is still hissing behind you when the itch starts up again, that particular restlessness that has nothing to do with the body you're wearing and everything to do with the fact that you're wearing it at all. Isaac Rendón's hands are good hands, quick, callused in the right places from steam wands and hot metal, and the regulars like the freckles, the easy laugh that isn't even yours. Twenty-three hours and ten minutes of him and you already know the whole shape of the day ahead — the closing shift, the drive to an apartment that isn't yours, a life sanded down to habits you're only borrowing. It was never about liking them. It's about the turning. You wipe his hands on his apron, tell the shift lead you're stepping out, and thumb open the site on a cracked phone screen that isn't yours either. The wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, which is the only honest way you've ever done this.

The color drains, comes back different.

You are standing. That is the first thing — standing, not sitting, weight settled into a stance that has done this ten thousand times before, feet planted wide on concrete gone warm with afternoon. A leash is looped twice around a fist that is not the fist you had a second ago, thicker, weathered, a white scar of dried skin across two knuckles that isn't a scar so much as just years. Down at the end of the leash a beagle has its whole face in a hedge, tail going, oblivious. The leash goes slack. You feel the hand — his hand — pause on it, uncertain, the way a driver's foot pauses over a brake before the mind catches up to the road. Then it winds twice, tight, and the legs start walking, and the dog has to trot to keep up with a stride it doesn't recognize.

The polo shirt is doing the talking first. It's soft through wear, gone thin at the collar, and touching its hem where it's tucked loose over the belt gives you a flash — him at a drawer that morning, the light through venetian blinds still orange-dim, picking this blue one over a gray one because the gray one smelled like the hamper. That's it. That's the whole decision that put this shirt on this body. You feel it land in you like something almost funny, except it isn't yours to laugh at.

The jeans come next, worn soft at the thigh where a phone rides in the pocket, and touching the denim you get more: three years of these same jeans, washed until the knees went pale, a coin slot pocket with nothing in it because he stopped carrying change when the casino went all card-tap. Under your feet the sneakers are broken down at the heel, molded to a walk that starts every day at four in the morning on the wrong side of a service corridor, badge scanned, industrial door groaning open into fluorescent light and the smell of bleach and cigarette smoke that isn't his — he never smoked, never once, watched two uncles die slow from it and decided early he'd rather drink. That part comes in heavier, a whole year of it: nights ending at a bar three blocks from his apartment, the bartender who knows to pour the second one before he asks, the particular loneliness of last call in a town that never has one. High cholesterol flagged on a form he crumpled without reading twice. No wife circled on that form. No ex worth naming either — a couple of women who didn't stay long enough to leave a mark, nobody currently, nobody missed.

The leash handle in his palm gives you the job, all at once, the way a smell gives you a whole kitchen: six a.m., the back step of the truck, hanging off the grab rail with one boot on the tread while the world is still gray, block after block, can after can, his forearms remembering weight before his mind does. Grip strength built off ten years of hauling, a gut that's gone soft anyway because the job burns less than the beer replaces. Calluses map his palm like a second set of prints. Nothing else marks him — no ink, no rings, no piercings, just weather and the particular ache low in his back that's been there so long it doesn't register as pain, just as him.

And under all of it, quieter, comes the dog. Not a memory exactly — more a fact worn smooth: a beagle he didn't especially want, left behind by a roommate who moved to Reno two years back and never came for it, and how somewhere in there he stopped minding, started looking forward to this stretch of sidewalk at this hour of a day off, hedge after hedge, the dog's nose doing all the deciding.

His fingers, without you asking them to, start drumming once against his thigh — a tic that isn't waiting for anything, just running on its own current, same as it's run for years.

You lift the hand off the leash and turn it over in the light, the knuckle-scar catching, the gap in his teeth showing when your mouth opens on its own before you've told it to.

"Where the hell," you say, in his voice, low and rough with something like a laugh, "was I even walking to."