Greg Osterhout

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Ernesto's hands are wrong on the keyboard — too short, too thick through the palm, the wedding-band tan-line from a marriage that isn't yours either. You've had him less than a minute and already the apartment smells like formaldehyde and drugstore cologne, and the funeral home's night line is blinking on the desk phone because somebody's mother died in Marietta and wants to know about caskets. You don't want to talk about caskets. You spent twenty-three men getting here and this one smells like it. That's the whole reason, if you're honest, which you are not required to be: you are bored in a way that has a taste, like a tooth going bad, and the only cure you've found in three years is the wheel. You open the laptop. The page loads slow on his ancient WiFi. You pay. You spin.

It lands wrong-footed — literally. A stumble that doesn't finish, weight coming down on the other foot, and you're six-three now instead of five-six, running instead of sitting, cold air instead of embalming fluid. Dawn light flat and gray off a canal. A watch buzzes against a wristbone that used to be Ernesto's and is now someone you don't have a name for yet. Earbuds feed you a podcast voice mid-sentence about mortgage rates. Your — his — breath comes out in a rope of visible fog. Two steps of wrongness and then the stride just resumes, like nothing happened, because as far as the world is concerned nothing did.

The jacket is what gives him to you first. Nylon, worn soft at the elbows, a zipper pull gone smooth from a thousand mornings of the same three fingers finding it in the dark. You feel — not remember, feel — the specific ritual of it: alarm at 5:10, the bathroom light left off so as not to wake her, the jacket off the hook by the door where it always hangs, second hook from the left, the first one being hers. Socks already on before the jacket, always, because once he forgot and the cold floor took the whole morning's motivation with it.

The watch keeps feeding you splits it has no memory of him running, and that wrongness needles at something — a version of him jogging this same path yesterday, and the day before, mile four always the one where his knee complains and he ignores it, because Dr. Aldous told him at forty-five that skinny men still get diabetes and Cheryl's father dropped dead at fifty-three on a riding mower and Greg Osterhout intends to outlast the actuarial tables through sheer bloody-minded cardio.

Cheryl. The name arrives with the ring — cool metal on the finger, plain gold, no stones, bought at a jewelry counter in a mall that's now a Dollar General, twenty-two years ago, her hand shaking a little when she said yes because she'd already decided, before he asked, that this was the scar she'd sign up for. The scar. Your — his — jaw and neck carry it like a permanent shadow, tight and shining along one side, and touching it — the wind touches it now, cold — gives you the transformer that arced when he was twenty-six, still an apprentice, the flash and the smell of himself burning before the pain even arrived, and Cheryl in the ER holding his other hand like she could keep the rest of him from following the burned part out the door.

There's a daughter. Fifteen, at that stage where she flinches if he hugs her in front of the school, and he lets her, because he remembers being fifteen and flinching too, and because some door in him has already decided that not embarrassing her is its own kind of love. The memory of her laugh, though — younger, six or seven, riding on his shoulders through the hardware store while he priced conduit — comes through clean and whole and hurts in a way you didn't order and don't especially want.

The shirt he's not wearing yet — that's tomorrow, that's the job, that's a half-finished ceiling and a nametag that says GREG in white plastic letters, stains from a hundred jobs ground into the collar, his own smell of solder and sweat that Cheryl claims she can't smell anymore, twenty-two years in. His hands know things without asking: the exact twist to strip twelve-gauge wire without nicking the copper, the particular grunt of a breaker box that hasn't been serviced since Carter. His body is all tendon and low blood pressure, six foot three of him folding easily into crawlspaces smaller men can't manage, the reflux that wakes him at three some nights tasting like a warning he never quite listens to.

None of it is unhappy. That's the strange part, arriving in a man with no wound in him anywhere you can find — a marriage that still works, a kid he'd die for, a scar he stopped hating around year three. You keep looking for the crack that made you deserve him and there isn't one. He's just a man, running, mid-stride, mid-life, mid-everything, three thousand miles from where you left Ernesto's laptop open and glowing on a desk that isn't yours anymore either.

You stop running. Whoever's still asleep behind that porch light two miles back doesn't know it yet, but her husband just stood dead still on a dawn canal path for the first time in eleven years of this exact loop.

You look at your hands — his hands, long-fingered, a callus riding the pad of the trigger finger from wire strippers, the ring catching gray morning light.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, your breath fogging around a voice that isn't the one that's owned this mouth for forty-eight years. "Okay, Greg."