Gary Prechtel

The line ticket printer jams again, and that's the third time this shift, and Andrés's shoulders — twenty-two years old, freckled, wiry-strong under the heat lamps — ache from being somebody else's hands for eleven months now. The kitchen smells like burnt garlic and bleach. Someone yells for two carnitas, no cilantro. You have been good at this body. You have liked it, even, the quickness of it, the way it moves through a ticket rail like it was built for one. But boredom is a slow gas leak, not a door slamming, and today you noticed you were counting the minutes of a shift you used to lose yourself inside. On your break, phone screen cracked at the corner, you open the site out of habit more than hunger. The wheel loads slow on the diner wifi. You spin it anyway, thumb already knowing the motion better than it knows anything else about this life.

The wind stops.

Not a gust dying — all of it, gone at once, the way a held breath is gone the second you let it out, and into that dead air you carry a weight you have not carried in months: heavier hips, thicker gut pressing soft against a shirt, knees that announce themselves. The green-black wall of cloud is still crossing the field ahead of you, but your legs are already moving, unbidden, off the porch and down the two steps, chin coming up to meet the weather instead of running from it. Somewhere behind you a screen door bangs on its hinge, once, and goes still.

The shirt is the first thing. Blue, small check, short-sleeved, and the moment your shoulders roll inside it you are standing at a dresser that isn't there, a bar of gray morning light through a bedroom window, Linda's hairdryer going in the bathroom down the hall. You remember — no, Gary remembers, and it comes to you sideways, like weather seen through a screen — buttoning this same shirt a hundred mornings, the second button always catching because the placket's gone soft with age. You remember standing in front of that mirror and thinking, not for the first time, that sixty-five looks like a man wearing somebody else's stomach. You laughed about it once, out loud, to no one.

Your feet remember New Balances before you look down at them — the give in the sole, broken in on a thousand driveway walks, the same model for fifteen years because why mess with a good thing. Under them now is wet grass, cold through the mesh, and a flash comes with it: barefoot on this same lawn twenty years back, a green hose coiled by the spigot, two kids — a boy and a girl, small then, now grown and gone to Sacramento and Tucson — shrieking through a sprinkler while Linda called out not to get the porch wet. That house isn't this house. This is the after-house, the one he and Linda bought smaller once the kids left, once a first marriage ended somewhere in the wreckage of your thirties and a second one started quieter, steadier, full of church potlucks and a woman who did not ask him to be anything but what he already was.

The ring is on your left hand, plain gold, warm from his skin before you arrived and warm now from yours. It brings the wedding back whole — a modest chapel, folding chairs, his mother-in-law's casserole after, Linda's hand small and certain in his. And under it, further down, an older ring he doesn't wear anymore, a first wife's face he can still call up without wanting to, a divorce that cost him the house in Fresno and half a decade of Sundays with his son before things mended into something workable. He does not hate her. He stopped being able to, somewhere around year two of not drinking, when the fog cleared enough to see what he'd actually done.

The moustache — you feel it before you think about it, upper lip heavy with it, gray coming into the sandy blond at the corners like frost finding a field first. He grew it the year he quit smoking, something to do with his mouth besides want a cigarette. Twenty-some years of it now. Linda calls it his flag. Says she'd know him from it in a crowd of a thousand men his age, all of them gone soft and gray in the same places.

Your hands, loose at your sides, already want to drum against your thigh — a tic so old it isn't even nervous anymore, just a rhythm his body keeps for itself, the way some men whistle. Sales calls he used to take like that, fingers going against the desk while he closed deals he didn't much believe in. Decades of it. Retired four years now, and the fingers haven't gotten the message.

The field ahead is the one he's watched storms cross a hundred times from this exact step, coffee mug usually in hand, because there is nothing in this whole quiet Wednesday that has anywhere else to be. No grandkids visiting today. No church committee. Just Linda somewhere inside, probably at the sink, and a sky doing what skies do, and a man who has decided, without deciding, that after sixty-five years of running from weather, he would like, just this once, to walk straight into it.

You lift your hands — his hands, thick-knuckled, a workingman's hands that never did much harder work than carrying boxes and turning a wheel — and turn them over in the strange dead light before the storm breaks. Not your hands. Never will be, not really, no matter how many mornings you wear this shirt.

"Well," you say, out loud, to the field, to nobody, in a voice that surprises you with how easily it comes, "guess we'll see."

Behind you the screen door bangs once more in the wind picking back up, and ahead of you the storm keeps coming, patient, the way storms are, the way the wheel is, not asking whether you're ready, not telling you how long you get to stand in this one before it spins you somewhere else.