Gary Holcomb

The rig deck is loud even in the trailer office, even with the door shut, and Rafael Ontiveros's hazel eyes are doing the thing you hate, which is watering at the corners from a headwind you didn't feel because you weren't really driving this body, just wearing it around like a coat you borrowed for five minutes. His hands — thick-knuckled, a burn scar across two fingers you didn't put there, callus deep as a coin slot — are shaking a little, not from cold. Five minutes in and already the small stuff is surfacing: a woman's name he almost said in his sleep last night, ex-wife maybe, a debt he owes somebody in Bakersfield, a knee that clicks on the ladder rungs. None of it is yours. None of it will ever be. That's the thing about riding a man five minutes — you get the weather of him and none of the seasons, and something in you, something old and spinning, wants weather you haven't felt yet. You didn't come back for Rafael. You came back because five minutes wasn't enough of anybody, lately, and hasn't been for a while — six hundred and forty-seven men and the itch still there under all of it, patient as rust. You find the laptop, the site loads the way it always loads, gray and plain and asking for nothing but money, and you pay, and you spin.

The wheel doesn't show you where it's going. It never does.

The strip light is the first thing — too white, humming at a pitch just under hearing, and under it your knee is bouncing on a leatherette seat, and it stops on the same click that the number board makes going from 47 to 48. Cold paper cup in your right hand, water gone flat and lukewarm. You set it down on the little side table, square against the edge like it matters, and you fold your hands in your lap, and somebody down the row is saying a name — Holcomb, Gary Holcomb — and you don't look up. Sixty-four years of a man's weight settles into you all at once: heavier through the shoulders than Rafael, looser in the knees, a low ache behind the left eye that isn't pain yet but is filing paperwork to become it. Blue eyes. Thinning hair you can feel the air on, cool along a scalp that hasn't had real cover in a decade. The jacket sleeve against your wrist is nylon, slick, and it opens first.

Navy jacket, zipped to the base of the throat. You put it on this morning — not you, him, but the arm remembers the motion, shrugging it up over the gray polo, the little tug at the collar to sit it right, the zipper pull cold between two fingers. Ellen had asked if he was warm enough, standing at the counter in her robe with coffee going, and he'd said he was fine, he was always fine, that's what you said at sixty-four when your wife still worried about you like you were fifty. The kitchen light had been on over the stove. Outside, rain doing the thing Seattle rain does, not falling so much as simply being present in the air. He'd tied his shoes on the edge of the hall bench — these shoes, gray mesh, the laces double-knotted out of forty years of habit, no different for a doctor's office than for a five-mile loop around the park he does most mornings when his knees allow it. The pants are the old khakis, soft through years of washing, and his hip remembers a chair at his daughter's graduation in these exact pants, sun too bright, his son elbowing him about the crease.

The ring is a smaller thing and hits harder. Left hand, plain gold band, and it comes with thirty-one years attached to it like a fish still on the hook — a hospital hallway the night their first was born, Ellen's hand crushing his fingers white; a fight about money in a kitchen that isn't this kitchen, the old house before the second one; her laugh, specific, a startled bark of a thing, at something he said in a restaurant on their anniversary two years back. He is, underneath everything, a man who likes his life. Retired eighteen months now from something with spreadsheets and other people's money, mornings on the porch now instead of a commute, and he does not entirely know what to do with all the time except that Ellen seems glad to have him home, mostly, and the mornings taste better than they used to.

The migraine is already announcing itself, a dim throb starting behind the left eye, and his hand — this hand, your hand now — wants to drum its fingers on his knee, an old unconscious tic, and it does, twice, before the number board clicks and something in his chest that was worry a second ago is simply gone, replaced with nothing, replaced with you.

You look at the hand. Spotted faintly at the back, a thin white scar along one knuckle you don't have a story for yet and maybe never will, the wedding band catching the strip light dull and gold. You turn it over once, like checking it's real, and lift your eyes off it into the fluorescent glare of the room, past the number board, past the door.

"Forty-eight," you say, out loud, to no one, and do not stand up yet.