Gary Hutchens

The ledger closes at 4:58 and you sit there another minute just breathing in a body that never asks you for anything, which is exactly the problem. Twenty-five years old, this one, athletic, freckled across the back of hands that type fast and never ache. Six hundred ninety-six men behind you and this is the first body that has ever felt like a rest, and rest is its own kind of itch after a while. You did the reconciliations. You answered the emails. You ate a sandwich standing at the window watching the light go long and gold over Back Bay and thought, not for the first time this week, that you have never once spun the wheel into a Wednesday afternoon on purpose, into a man mid-task instead of a man mid-collapse or mid-sleep or mid-nothing. You want to feel someone's hands still moving when you arrive. That's the whole reason, if you're honest, and you are, because there's no one left to lie to about it. You open the laptop, find the page you have open in a browser tab like it's a bank statement, and you spin.

The mower's engine coughs on a stone or a root and catches again, and it is not your hand on the bar anymore, it is a hand that already knows this bar, thick-fingered, a wedding band snagging faint heat off the Arizona sun. Weight drops into you all at once — heavier through the gut than you've carried in six hundred spins, a low thick strength in the shoulders, sweat already itching at a hairline buzzed close enough to feel the sun on scalp. The loose earmuff swings against your jaw and your hand — his hand — reaches up on its own, unhurried, and settles it back over the ear before the next row, which runs dead straight where the last several didn't.

The denim shorts drag at your knees with clippings stuck to fine blond-gray hair, and that contact alone throws a morning at you: this exact pair, grabbed off a hook in a laundry room that smells like fabric softener and two-stroke oil, tugged on over legs that ached yesterday from kneeling on a subfloor in Ahwatukee. The shirt is next, navy cotton gone soft-thin with washing, and pulling it over your head this morning — his morning, six hours behind the one you left — came with the ordinary weather report on the radio and a thought about whether the framing crew would show before ten. Denise was already gone to work. The house was quiet in the particular way it gets once three kids have scattered themselves into a school day, backpacks and a fight over a hair tie and someone's cleats left by the door that he almost broke his ankle on at six in the morning, laughing about it to no one.

The push mower's grip is worn smooth in two spots exactly where his palms have always landed, and that wood-and-rubber feel drags up fifteen years of Saturday mornings, a hundred of them, before the yard crew he could afford now and always forgets to hire because mowing is the one job on any list that finishes clean, no change orders, no inspector, no client calling to ask why the tile grout doesn't match the sample she saw under different light. There's a whole marriage folded into that thought — Denise's voice on the phone last week, tired in a fond way, telling him to just call somebody already; and under that, further down, a different voice from twenty-some years back, an ex whose name still surfaces sometimes not from longing exactly but from the plain fact that she was there first, in the version of him that didn't yet know how heavy this would all get to carry, before the gray under the dye job, before the belt line hitched permanently under a gut that muscle had gone soft around without leaving.

The boots against the grass — no, not boots, he's in shoes today, off the clock, the boots are back at a job site standing in sawdust and framed studs, and that memory arrives sideways through the ghost-ache in his lower back, the specific soreness of fifty years old and thirty of them spent bent over lumber. Knees that pop on the stairs. A shoulder that clicks reaching overhead. And underneath all of it, steady as a pulse, the small mindless competence of a man who has done manual work his whole life — the body correcting the mower's line without being told to, the way his forearm knows exactly how much push a patch of St. Augustine needs before it'll cut clean.

You are careful, here in the last of it, in a way you are not always careful. You do not chase the ex-girlfriend's face further than it offers itself. You let Denise stay where she is, a warmth without more shape than warmth. Three kids' names surface and you let them go by unclaimed, because that is his and you are only passing through it, holding a stranger's whole life the way you'd hold a borrowed coat, aware of every seam.

The engine idles under your palms, patient, waiting on the next pass. You look down at the hand on the bar — thick, sun-browned, a plain gold band worn thin at one edge — and you turn it over slow, the way you always do, checking it like you might find your own name written on the palm and never do.

You look up into the glare off the bricks, off the cactus throwing its long thin shadow across three-quarters of a lawn already gone dead straight, and you say, to no one, in his voice, "Almost done."

Nobody answers. The grass keeps coming.