Gary Prentiss

Danilo Reyes's kitchen is quiet at midnight, and his knee will not stop bouncing, though that's not why — Danilo's knee has always done that, and you've stopped noticing it's not yours to fix. What is yours to notice: the beer he doesn't drink anymore sweating untouched on the counter, an ex-wife's number he still hasn't deleted from a phone that isn't his either, and the particular boredom of being a man whose hands know exactly how to set a dovetail joint and nothing else you wanted from him. Thirty-five years old, brown eyes, a nose broken once by somebody's fist in a story you never got the rest of. Good hands. A good little life you didn't build and are already tired of wearing. You get up, you go to the laptop, you open the site the way you've opened it nine hundred and nineteen times before, and the wheel spins without asking you why, because you stopped needing a why a long time ago.

The dryer door is warm against your forearm and a sock is in your hand, one gray sock, and your knees ache in a way Danilo's never did — deeper, older, both of them at once, and there is more of you now, more belly, more weight settled low and comfortable. The fluorescent tube overhead hums its one flat note. You are crouched. You pull the load out warm and it drops into the basket in your arms like it's done this ten thousand times, and your hands are already moving before you've caught up to them — folding, fast, corners squared, a rhythm laid down so deep it doesn't wait for you to want it.

The tattoo on your upper arm gives first — bold lines gone soft at the edges, an eagle maybe, or a rose, you can't tell without looking and you don't need to look, because touching your own skin through the t-shirt sleeve brings back a shop in downtown Phoenix, twenty-six years old, a friend's bachelor party, the specific ache of a needle and the specific pride of walking out with something permanent when nothing else in his life had been. Gary. His name arrives with the ink: Gary Prentiss.

The t-shirt against your back gives the rest, sleeve by sleeve, because that's the key and it doesn't stop turning once it starts. This morning — his morning, hours behind where you're standing now, but his all the same — pulling this shirt over his head in a bedroom with the blinds still down, his wife already gone to work, three kids' worth of school lunches already made because that's his job now, has been for years, and he doesn't mind it, doesn't mind much of anything these days except how his knees sound on the ladder. Overalls next, the good white ones gone the color of a Jackson Pollock afterthought, snapped at the shoulders, a paintbrush worn soft as a shaving brush riding in the hip pocket out of habit even on a day off from the job. An emptied room somewhere in the east valley, drop cloths taped at the baseboards, trim taped in blue, the particular pleasure of a clean line laid down with a steady hand — his hands, hands that know this the way your other hands, Danilo's hands, know a chisel. Two trades, two men, and you are standing in the second one now with the first one already going soft and far away like a name you're forgetting on purpose.

The wedding band is cold and then warm against your palm as you fold a shirt over it. Twenty-nine years married, near enough, to a woman who still makes him laugh so hard his ribs hurt, and under that, quieter, an ex-wife who calls sometimes when the kids won't pick up, and he still takes the call every time, still feels something there he never bothered naming. A pack a day, twenty years of quitting the drink and never quite managing the cigarettes, and lately a want to quit that too and a laziness about it that feels almost peaceful. Catholic on Christmas and Easter and the days his mother's memory gets loud. Three kids grown enough now to have opinions about his beard. A little money put by, not much, enough. Deep dimples that show even now, even doing nothing, folded into a face that has spent fifty-eight years being easy to like.

The basket is full. The last towel goes in square-cornered on top of the pile, and your hands go still for the first time since you arrived, and you turn them over in the humming light — Gary's hands, thick-knuckled, a little paint under one nail that the turpentine missed, the ring catching the fluorescent tube. You look up from them into nothing in particular, into the cinderblock wall, and you hear his voice come out of your mouth for the first time, easy, a little rough at the edges the way a smoker's is.

"Damn," you say, to the empty laundry room, "I fold better than she does."

Nobody answers. The dryer ticks as it cools. Somewhere upstairs a wife you haven't met yet is watching television, and somewhere behind you, in a dark you can't see from here, a spin you haven't taken yet is already waiting, whenever it decides to come.