Frank Delisio

The tattoo shop is closed and the register is closed and still you are sitting in the back room on the stool that has never been comfortable, turning a needle over in a hand you have worn six hundred and seventy-eight times before this one, and it is not enough, it has not been enough since sometime last week, though you could not tell anyone the day it stopped. The birthmark on this face itches when you think too hard, which might be nothing, might be psychosomatic, might be this body finally telling you something you already know: that you have been careful with it, that carefulness has become its own kind of prison. Fifty-five and gray and soft in the middle and good at a craft you didn't build, in a city that isn't yours, married to nobody, missing nobody, because none of that transferred, none of it ever does. Monday afternoon. Nothing scheduled. You open the site on the phone you don't remember buying, the wheel already loading before your thumb finds it, and you don't decide so much as arrive at the decision the way you arrive at everything now — already moving.

The couch takes your weight before you know it's a couch. There is a can in your hand, warm, nearly empty, and your mouth is open and dry and a small tinny roar is coming from somewhere in front of you, and your eyes open on a ballgame you did not choose and a room you have never stood in, end table stacked with paperbacks, a lamp doing its one yellow job in the corner. Your body — his body — sits up out of a doze so smoothly it's like the sleep belongs to someone still lingering in the cushions, and your thumb, not quite yours yet, finds the remote and thumbs the volume down with a certainty that surprises you, like the hand already knows this house is the kind where you don't wake the rest of it.

The sweatshirt is soft and worn thin at the elbows and it comes with a Tuesday in October, cold enough for the furnace to click on twice while you stood in the driveway arguing with your son about a truck payment, the boy's jaw so much like your own it embarrassed you into silence. The socks — thick, gray, a Christmas three-pack from a daughter who buys practical gifts because she thinks that's love, and she isn't wrong. The ring. Your thumb finds it without asking, turns it, the same worn groove your hand has cut into your own skin over thirty-one years, and there she is: Carol, not young in the memory but not old either, just there, laughing at something at a cookout, sunglasses pushed up into hair she still colors herself in the bathroom mirror. There is another woman further back, dimmer, a name that used to mean everything — Denise — a summer so long ago it has gone soft at the edges like a photograph left in a wallet, and you loved her the way you only get to love once, badly and completely, and you let her go for reasons that seemed unanswerable at twenty-four and unforgivable at forty. Carol never asked about her. Carol never needed to.

The shirt against your back — not this shirt, the memory of it, the work shirt with FRANK stitched over the pocket — brings the morning fully: the seven a.m. cold in the garage, the smell of coffee gone half bitter in the truck's cupholder, shrugging into sleeves gone stiff from the dryer, the belt with its worn leather pouch settling onto hips that have carried it for twenty-some years without complaint. Three kids raised on that belt's paycheck and a fourth almost, before the miscarriage nobody talks about anymore. A house paid off. A ceiling half-finished today, conduit run and waiting, a job he'll finish tomorrow because tomorrow is always there, steady as the stoplight downtown that is the only stoplight downtown. He liked his life. That is the strange, small ache coming through the cushions and the can and the ring — not tragedy, not unfinished business, just a Monday ending the way ten thousand Mondays ended, a man tired in a body sixty-three years used and generally willing, cholesterol high, knees fine, hands still sure enough to strip a wire in the dark. He quit smoking the year his first grandchild was born and never once said why out loud.

You look at the hand on the armrest. Broad, spotted faintly at the knuckle, a mole riding high on the cheek you can feel but not see, the wedding band catching lamp light when you turn your wrist over, slow, like checking it's real.

"Bottom of the eighth," you say, to no one, your voice lower than the one you had an hour and a body ago, and you let it sit in your own mouth like trying on a coat, not yet sure how many more innings you get to keep it.