Gregory Farnholt

You stand in Marcus Aldine's kitchen at two in the morning, holding a coffee mug you don't want, in a body that isn't yours and never will be. Twenty minutes. The forearms are good — thick, young, unmarked but for the freckles — but the shoulders ache in a way that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with a man who shoes horses for a living, and the ache annoys you more than it should. Outside, an Ohio dark presses on the windows, total and rural and silent. Somewhere in this house Marcus's mother is asleep, and you know that because it arrived a minute ago in a flash off the mug — his mother's kitchen, her mug, Sunday mornings — and you didn't ask for it and you didn't want it. That's the trouble. Twenty minutes and already too much of him is leaking through the cup handle into your hand. You didn't spin the wheel to inherit somebody's mother. You open the laptop on the counter, thumb still remembering how to type though the thumb is his, and you go to the page with the wheel on it.

You pay. You spin.

—

The ache goes first — that's how you know it happened, before you even open your eyes. A different ache, lower, older, settled into the lumbar spine like it's been filed there for years. The chest is wider. The breath that was ragged a half-second ago — someone else's ragged, a snore caught mid-motion — smooths out under you like water finding level. The arm that had been hanging off the mattress, dead weight, draws itself up on its own, and the whole heavy frame rolls from face-down to face-up, hands coming together and folding over the sternum, fingers lacing there like a man laid out for viewing. It is not a position this body has slept in, not once, not in fifty-two years, and it does it now without asking anyone.

Streetlight comes through the gap in the curtain, gold and thin, across a ceiling you don't recognize yet.

—

The pillow is what starts it — cheap foam gone flat, and through it comes the smell of the room, WD-40 and old wood and a whisper of bleach from a bathroom down the hall, and with the smell comes San Francisco, comes fog through a bay window at street level, comes the specific tiredness of a man who has been kneeling under other people's sinks since six that morning on a Saturday when everyone with sense is asleep — but he isn't everyone, he took the weekend emergency line because the money's better and the rent on this garage-under-a-house doesn't care what day it is.

His name comes up slow, the way a stranger's name comes up when you've only just been introduced: Gregory. Greg to the dispatcher, to the customers who open their doors half-embarrassed at what their pipes have done. Farnholt on the invoices. Fifty-two years old and the back has been wrong since somewhere in his thirties, a slipped disc that never fully un-slipped, and it announces itself now, lying there, a low insistent burn along the waist that has been so constant for so long it barely counts as pain to him anymore — just weather.

Your hands are folded on his chest and one of them finds, without your telling it to, a ring. Not a wedding ring — he never married — but a ring all the same, plain, worn thin on the inside curve, and his thumb turns it the way it has turned it ten thousand times without him noticing, and that turning cracks the whole thing open at once.

Her name was Denise. Nine years, on and off, more off toward the end, and the ring was going to be a beginning and became instead the thing he kept because taking it off felt like admitting a verdict. She left San Francisco for Sacramento eleven years ago for a job that turned into a life that didn't include him, and they still talk, sometimes, at intervals that have gotten longer, and every time they talk he tells himself this is the last time he lets it matter and every time it matters exactly the same amount. No kids. There was a stretch in his forties where that silence in the house felt like a verdict too, and then it just felt like Tuesday.

The overalls are next — not on him now, hung on a nail by the garage's inside door, but the memory of putting them on this morning comes through anyway, riding on the smell of denim and pipe grease that's settled into the room permanently, into the mattress, into him. Left arm through first, always — some old habit from an apprenticeship thirty years back — the half-sleeve on the right catching cold air before the flannel came down over it, the crest of a team he stopped being able to afford tickets to years ago but never stopped wearing on his own skin. The belt cinched under the gut he's stopped fighting. The boots that go on last and come off first, because his knees complain worst at the very end of a kneeling day, and today's day was a full one — a stranger's bathroom sink in the Sunset, elbows deep in old galvanized pipe, the particular satisfaction of a wrench finding the exact give it needs and a joint finally breaking free after twenty minutes of stubbornness. His hands, thick, scarred faint white across three knuckles, know the weight of a pipe wrench the way another man's hands know a steering wheel — automatically, at rest even when working.

No drink in the fridge; quit that eight years ago, after a stretch he doesn't like remembering, and quit clean enough that he doesn't miss it most days, only on the anniversary of quitting, which is a private little ritual of gratitude and grief he's never told anyone about. Never smoked, never saw the appeal. Scraping by, mostly, the business a one-man operation, the invoices thin some months, and none of it is what he pictured at twenty-five, but the body under the ache is still strong — strong hands, strong back for all that it hurts, a trade that doesn't quit needing him even when everything else in his life quietly has.

The last thing that comes, faint, riding on nothing but the dark and the shape of the empty other half of the bed: that the two-in-the-morning hour he's asleep at is not really his hour, most nights — plumbing emergencies don't respect a clock, and neither does the mind of a man who's spent thirty years learning to sleep whenever the work allows it, wherever the exhaustion lands him.

—

You bring your folded hands up off your chest and turn one of them over in the gray light, palm up, looking at the white scars across the knuckles like they belong to someone you're about to meet. The ring catches the streetlight once.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the ceiling, to a room that doesn't answer — and the ring keeps turning under your thumb, already a habit, already yours, for exactly as long as this lasts.