Gary Ostrowski

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Russell Kopecky's hands smell like cutting fluid no matter how many times he washes them, and you have had exactly forty seconds to hate that. You are standing in his kitchenette at the shop, black hair, stubble rough under your — his — palm, the beauty mark on the jaw catching fluorescent light in the little mirror by the time clock. Forty seconds a machinist, and already the ache is back in the shoulder that isn't yours yet is, the old rotator cuff thing you inherited along with everything else, and you know this ache, you've had it eight hundred and forty-three times in eight hundred and forty-three different specific places, and none of it is the point. The point is that this body, heavy and competent and *fine*, is simply not interesting to be. Nothing wrong with it. That's the whole problem. You want the small itch of somebody else's Thursday. You go back to the site on your break, thumb shaking a little from a coffee that isn't decaf, and you spin.

The wheel gives you Gary mid-motion, hand on a folder, weight already leaning into the next page before you arrive to want it. The rhythm hitches — one flick of the wrist too fast, papers skewing — and then corrects, slow, deliberate, like a man double-checking a math problem he's solved ten thousand times. You feel the polo shirt snug at the belly, the toothpick worn soft and splintering at one corner between his back teeth, the particular low western sun coming sideways through the glass wall of an office that is, absurdly, still open-doored to a gravel yard full of saguaro throwing knife-shadows across the stones. Two-something in the afternoon. His afternoon. Yours was a different hour entirely, and neither of you will ever know that.

The polo is the first thing that talks to you. Navy, a little static-clingy at the gut, and it gives you a bathroom mirror at 6:40 this morning, this morning being real, being Gary's, fluorescent and small, the fringe combed flat with water because it's the only haircut the barber on Thomas Road has done for him in eleven years and there's no reason to change what works. Pulling the collar down. Checking the badge clip. Behind him in the mirror's edge, his wife Donna's robe on the hook, and something in his chest going quiet and grateful about that robe without him ever once saying so out loud, not to her, not to anyone.

The toothpick gives you more, gives you years: chewing them since he quit the Marlboros the month Danielle was born, twenty-two years back now, and the taste of wood standing in for the taste he still sometimes wants at four in the afternoon when the reports get long. The belt gives you the fifteen pounds that crept on after the second promotion, the one that got him the office but took away the floor, took away the actual machines, put him behind glass watching other men do what his hands used to know cold. He is good at this job and he has never once loved it, and that gap has become just a fact of his life, like weather.

The ring is the loudest thing. Left hand, plain band, and it opens Donna whole: the two of them at a company picnic thirty-one years ago, her laughing at something not even funny, and the specific terror of asking her out a second time after she'd already said no once. It opens the wedding, small, a Methodist church with bad air conditioning. It opens, too, unbidden and unwanted, a woman named Renee from a decade before Donna, gone to Tucson, married now to somebody else, who he thinks of maybe once a season with a small clean ache like touching a bruise on purpose. He never told Donna about the frequency. He never will.

Under it all: fifty-four in a body that carries itself like it's still forty, until the knees remind him otherwise on the stairs. Skinny fat, he'd call it if he ever called it anything, soft where muscle used to sit. Two kids grown enough now that the house has gone quiet in a way that some nights he likes and some nights he doesn't. A beard he's kept the same length since it started coming in gray at the chin, because Donna said once she liked it and he has never seen a reason to test that.

Your hand — his hand — is still on the folder. You look at it. Freckled, ring loose enough to spin a little with the thumb, half a toothpick clenched forgotten between molars.

You lift your eyes to the glass, to the saguaro standing black against all that light, and you say, out loud, to no one in the office:

"Okay. Where was I."