Emilio Vasquez

The site loads the way any other page loads. That's the part that never sits right — the ordinariness of the loading bar, the little wheel spinning while the wheel itself gets ready. You've had this tab open for an hour, closed it twice, opened it again. Nothing on tonight. Nothing on most nights. You've wanted this since before you had the word for it, since some or other movie where two people traded faces and you sat there feeling like it had reached into you specifically. Years of that, private, a little embarrassing, never spoken aloud to anyone who could do anything about it. Now there's a button that says SPIN and a price that isn't nothing and a hand — figurative, you have no hand yet — that goes ahead and clicks it anyway.

The wheel turns on the screen. It stops on nothing you chose.

The kitchen arrives before you do. Fluorescent light off a hood vent, cheap tile underfoot, a hand — his — mid-stir over a pan of something browning. You are standing in his weight, which is less than you expected and more solid, compact, a body used every day for things that would wreck yours. The stirring stops. Your — his — arm hangs there a second with the spoon in it, and then it starts again, the other direction, because you're getting the feel of the controls. Salt shakes into the pan. You don't taste it. Down from the cabinet comes a second plate, and it goes on the counter next to the first one, for no reason you understand yet, your hand doing it before you've caught up to why.

Then the why comes, because the shirt is against your back and that's a door and it opens.

Morning — his morning, hours off from wherever you actually are, but his, the one this shirt remembers — him pulling it on inside out first, swearing, yanking it back off over his head too fast so the collar catches his ear, laughing once at himself in a bathroom mirror with a crack in the lower corner. The grey work shirt, stiff with old salt-sweat no wash gets all the way out, softened only at the elbows where it's been bent ten thousand times the same way. It goes on and it is armor and uniform and skin all at once — sleeves rolled twice, never three times, because three times it slides down by lunch. The belt with the pouches heavier on the right hip than the left, hammer riding there like it's always ridden there, and his hand doesn't need to look to find the claw of it.

The roof comes with the belt. Not one roof — all of them, stacked, the whole geography of this town read from above: the mill smell drifting up from the valley on the bad-wind days, the Bewley court water tower he can see if he stands at the peak on the Hoffman Street job, the stairs — those public backyard stairs, concrete slick with wet leaves in October — that he takes two at a time going down at the end of a shift because his knees still let him. Twenty-two months of that work now, since before he could legally drink half of what he actually drinks. His hands know shingles the way some men's hands know a fretboard, know exactly how much weight to put through a knee on a thirty-degree pitch without thinking about falling, because thinking about falling is how you fall.

The jaw does something on its own — clenches, releases, clenches — an old habit that isn't about anger, just a place tension goes to sit down. It's been doing that since fourteen. It'll do it long after tonight.

There's a woman this second plate is for. Her name arrives sideways, through the smell of the dish itself — arroz con pollo, his mother's recipe cut down to bachelor scale, one pan instead of the big pot — because she likes it and he learned it for her without telling her that's why. She's not coming tonight; something came up, a text still unanswered on the counter by the sink, and some folded-over part of him set the second plate out anyway, muscle memory outrunning the news, hope moving faster than fact the way it does in twenty-year-olds who haven't yet been taught not to let it.

The drink is in the cabinet above the fridge, more bottle than there should be for someone who works roofs at seven a.m., and there's a whole shape to that too — nights it helps and nights it doesn't and never any nicotine, never that, one vice was enough, he decided that once out loud to somebody and has kept the promise out of pure stubbornness.

The nose remembers its own breaking better than anything — a slap-fight that got real behind a Sheetz parking lot at sixteen, the crunch, the bloom of white behind his eyes, the way it healed a few degrees off-true and he decided he liked it that way, evidence of something, proof he'd been somewhere and come back from it.

All of this in the time it takes a pan to keep browning, unattended, nobody stirring it now.

You look down. The hand at the end of your arm is darker than any hand you've pictured wearing, knuckles rough, a thin white line of old callus along the side of the index finger from a trowel handle. You turn it over like it might have instructions on the other side. It doesn't. It's just a hand, twenty years old, already tired in a way that has nothing to do with tonight.

You look up, into the steam off the pan, toward wherever a face would be if there were a mirror.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, testing it like a stair you don't trust yet. "Okay."

Somewhere, a wheel is still spinning, waiting for you to decide it isn't done.