Gary Trembach

The kitchen you're standing in smells like somebody else's dinner, and your hand — this hand, brown, delivery-driver soft at the knuckle from three years of steering wheels and door handles — is still on the fridge door, because the kid who lives here texted back "k" to a birthday you sent forty minutes ago and that "k" has been sitting in your chest like a stone ever since. Twenty years old. Dad bod going soft under a work polo. Black hair he keeps meaning to cut. This body has been yours for less than a minute and you already know you're not staying in it — not because it's bad, it's fine, it's a body that works and eats and drives a Corolla with a cracked mount for the phone — but because the kid's "k" is the three-hundred-and-sixtieth reminder that whoever you rent does not actually love you back, and you would rather be new again than be unloved in a body you remember choosing. So you open the laptop still warm on the counter, the wheel already loaded from last night, and you spin before the feeling can pass, the way you always do, because waiting is the only part of this that ever hurts.

The engine drops a note under your hands and catches again, and you are gripping a mower bar with fingers that are thick and pale and freckled across the back, a wedding band biting cold-hot in the early evening sun. Grass clippings needle the shins below you — bare, hairy, heavier legs than you've worn in months. An earmuff hangs loose off your right ear, ambient birdsong leaking in on that side, lawnmower roar shut out on the other. Without deciding to, the hand that isn't yet fully yours reaches up and settles it back down over the ear, and the next pass runs dead straight beside a run of crooked ones, like the body already knows this job better than you do, because it does.

The push bar is rubber-gripped, cracked along one seam, and the second your palm settles into that crack it gives you a whole spring: kneeling in the garage taping the handle back together while your younger one — six, missing a tooth — asks if the mower is sick. You didn't have the words for the mole doctor asked about last month, the one high on your cheek he wants biopsied "just to be safe," so you told your kid the mower had a boo-boo and you were making it better, and that was easier than the truth, and you have not thought about the appointment since, until now, with somebody else's mind sitting behind your eyes and the memory arriving anyway, stubborn as grass.

The shirt is a soft old fire department tee, washed pale at the collar, and it gives you the morning you put it on — not this morning, a morning, all of them folded into one the way routine folds: the alarm at five-forty for a shift that starts at seven, your wife still asleep with one arm thrown over where you'd been, the smell of her shampoo on the pillow, the twenty-four hours ahead of you that might be nothing, might be a car wrapped around a light pole on 9, might be the diner catching after all these dead years since it closed and everybody in town standing on the sidewalk watching you go in. You pulled the shirt over a chest that's gone heavy and solid both, 5'6" and built low to the ground, strong through the back from hauling hose and weak in the knees from twenty years of ladders, blood pressure medicine in the cabinet you take with orange juice because it tastes better going down bitter that way. The mole on your cheek itches sometimes for no reason. You have stopped mentioning it.

The shorts against your legs, the grass wet-stuck to your shins, give you Saturday itself, whole: waking up without the alarm, your wife already up making the kids something with too much syrup, the mower waiting in the garage with its taped handle, three beers already gone by two in the afternoon because that's just Saturday, that's just how the day gets handled, and nobody in this house has ever once said the word about it out loud. The ring on your left hand — his hand, still not quite yours — gives you a wedding fifteen years back, her in a dress that wasn't fancy because neither of you had the money for fancy and it didn't matter, it has never once mattered.

You look down at your hands on the bar. Thick fingers. Green cut grass ground into the whorls of your palm. Not the hands you had an hour ago in that kitchen, not the hands before that and before that, three hundred and fifty-nine men back down a hallway you don't walk anymore. You lift your eyes off them, past the crooked mowed rows, toward the house where a wife you've never met is standing at a window with a dish towel, waiting on a husband who is about to come inside a stranger.

"Almost done, hon," you call out, in his voice, easy as anything — and you don't know yet if you'll still be the one saying it tomorrow.