Gary Pruett

Terrence Odum's hands smell like film cement and coffee, and they are not the hands you asked for.

You stood in his projection booth less than a minute ago, feeling the ache settle into a fifty-year-old back that had climbed too many booth ladders, and you thought: no. Not this one. Not tonight. It isn't boredom exactly — it's that you spent seven minutes inside the tailor before this, inside Danilo Restrepo's clever hands, and something in that shop, in the smell of chalk and steam, made you remember a face from Danilo's own memory. A coworker. A big, easy, gray-haired man who used to bring Danilo coffee at the shop before he switched districts, who Danilo liked without ever quite saying so. You didn't choose Gary Pruett. You chased him, the way you sometimes chase a person because you already halfway know them, secondhand, through someone else's fondness. You went back to the wheel still smelling like pins and thread.

The spin lands and you are sitting up straight before you understand why, spine snapping into a posture Gary himself wasn't holding a half-second earlier, some cheap syndicated laugh line dying in your throat unlaughed-at. A remote is coming to rest against the couch arm under a hand too big and too soft in the knuckles to be the one you had. The television throws its blue-white weather across a gut that did not used to be there. You are heavy in a new, settled way, low in the chair, the couch cushion sighing under you like it has taken this exact shape a thousand nights running.

The shirt is what opens first — not this shirt, the memory of the last clean one, cotton going soft with age, the button catching wrong on the second try, sleeve rolled twice because Denise likes it that way even though he wears it around the house for himself. Denise. The name arrives whole, with her voice in it, telling him to quit slouching, that man, at his age, and the fondness underneath the nagging that has outlasted twenty-two years together and every fight either of them can still list on demand. Not married. Never quite got there and it stopped being a wound sometime around year twelve.

The remote in his hand brings back Thursday afternoons — grading essays with the TV muted for company, a stack of ninth-grade paragraphs about symbolism in a novel none of them finished, red pen going soft in his grip the way pens go soft after thirty-one years of the same motion. The classroom comes with it, fluorescent and empty after the last bell, chairs shoved crooked, a smell of dry-erase marker and floor wax that lives permanently somewhere behind his sinuses. He has stood at that front of that room since before some of these kids' parents were born. He is tired in the specific way of a man who loves a thing that has slowly worn a groove into him shaped exactly like itself.

The lanyard he isn't wearing now still gives him something — the weight of it against his sternum all day, every day, key swinging, and under it the older weight: an ex-girlfriend, Renata, twenty-some years gone, whose photograph he kept in a drawer for longer than he'd admit to Denise, not out of longing exactly, more the way you keep a key to a house you don't live in anymore. Two kids came after her, with Denise — grown now, scattered, texting more than calling, and something opens warm and simple at the thought of them, uncomplicated in a way little else in this life has managed to stay.

His mouth finds a toothpick that isn't there and works anyway, jaw shifting on habit alone. Somewhere under the sternum a low structural hum he's stopped noticing — the blood pressure medication on the bathroom counter, the doctor's voice saying *watch the salt, Gary* — and he has, mostly, and mostly it hasn't mattered. His couch holds him like something that has held him a long time. He is not laughing at the television. He never laughs at this part; that was always someone else's habit bleeding briefly into his face and now it's gone again, and the show plays on, unfunny, correctly.

You look at the hand still resting on the remote — thick fingers, a plain band of skin where a ring almost was and then wasn't, silver hair at the wrist where the sleeve rides up. You turn it over slow, the way you always do, first minute in a new one, checking it's real.

"There you are," you say, to no one in the dark room, and you don't know yet if that means tonight or a year from now — only that Gary Pruett is yours, until you aren't looking for him anymore.