Gordon Aldrich

The apartment smells like machine oil no matter how long since Rene last stood at the lathe, and that is the first thing that gets old about him — not his body, which is good, thick through the shoulders, the kind of strong that doesn't have to think about it, but the smell that never leaves the skin no matter how you scrub. Six-thirty on a Monday, shift over, and you are standing in his kitchen with a beer you don't want, listening to a message from a woman named Carla who is definitely not going to forgive him for whatever he did last Thursday, and you realize you don't even know what he did last Thursday, because you weren't paying attention. You were just wearing him. Thirty-four years old, hazel eyes, a beauty mark you keep catching in the mirror like it belongs to someone else, and none of it is interesting anymore. Less than a minute ago by the only clock that matters to you, you decided this. You open the laptop already open on his counter, the tab already loaded like some other night's temptation, and you pay, and you spin, not because Rene did anything wrong but because he stopped being new.

The wheel lands and there is no in-between. You are mid-stride on wet asphalt, and your left foot comes down where your right foot expected to be, and the whole skeleton of you stutters — a stumble that never quite happens, absorbed into the next step like the body already knew how to forgive it. Earbuds feeding you a podcast voice mid-sentence. Breath showing white in air that shouldn't be cold enough for that, and isn't, quite — just the damp hanging off a canal at dawn. A watch on the wrist buzzes, registering a split time it has no memory of you running. Your arms are lower than you left them. Your head hasn't moved. Somewhere behind your sternum a stranger's heart is doing seventy-one-year-old-sounding things for a man of fifty-four, working a little harder than it should at mile four, and you feel that first, before you feel anything else — the effort of him.

Then the shirt. It's not a shirt right now, it's a compression top gone dark with sweat at the collar, and it gives you the morning it went on: he'd pulled it from the third drawer without looking, muscle memory, same drawer for eleven years, and stood in the bathroom a second too long with it in his hands because Diane had said something at breakfast about the Kalihi filing that he still hadn't answered. Small thing. It comes with a whole marriage attached to it like lint — twenty-six years, a woman who irons his shirts for court because he never learned and never had to, three kids who are grown or nearly, one of them still calling collect from a number he doesn't recognize on the mainland. And under that, quieter, guiltier, a name: Trish. Younger. Six months gone from his life and still living in his phone's search history, in the ache that comes with almost every quiet minute he's alone, which running supplies in abundance, which is maybe why he runs.

The shorts against your thighs bring back nothing but function — cheap, quick-dry, bought three pairs at once because they made him self-conscious less than the tighter kind, the freckled skin on his shins visible even to himself as something a fifty-four-year-old man ought to stop noticing and can't. The watch on your wrist gives you a decade of splits, mile after recorded mile, a doctor's voice saying *your A1C is fine as long as you keep doing this*, and under that the actual fact of it living in him always, quiet, managed, a pinch of resentment at the exactness required. Your knuckles want to crack. They do it now, mid-stride, an old tic older than the diagnosis, older than the marriage. Rings — one, plain, gold, warm already from his own hand — say nothing to you but *married* and let the rest come later, on its own time, the way these things do.

The earbuds are still playing. Somewhere behind you or ahead of you, Honolulu is going white and bright the way it does by eight, red dirt turning to dust at the yard's edge, tin roof somewhere behind you ticking as it heats. Courthouse steps wait for this body in ninety minutes with a briefcase and a tie he hasn't chosen yet. None of that is real to you yet. Only the running is real, the specific ache in the arches, the freckles he's had since childhood that no dermatologist ever worried about enough, the small vain dye job at the roots that a woman at a salon on King Street touches up every five weeks because he cannot stand, cannot stand, looking as old as he is.

You lift your right hand off the rhythm of the stride and look at it — pale, freckled, a stranger's wedding band catching the flat grey dawn light — and for a second the whole run just stops meaning anything, becomes only this: fingers you didn't grow, turning in front of a face you don't have.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to nobody, breath fogging once and gone. "Okay."

The watch buzzes again. You start running.