Gregory Nakashima

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Wendell Mackovic's kitchen smells like motor oil no matter how long he's been off shift, and you have been him for two minutes, standing at his own counter with his own mail in his own skinny freckled hands, and already you know this was a mistake. Sixty-one years old. A goatee that itches when you're anxious, which is always, apparently. A tow truck idling registration renewal sitting unopened on the counter like a rebuke. You spun for a change of scenery thirty-eight times ago and somewhere around number twenty you stopped being able to tell if you wanted anyone anymore or if you just wanted to not be the last one. Two minutes is not enough time to hate a man properly. It's enough time to know you don't want the goatee, don't want the itch of it, don't want to spend one Thursday evening being someone whose whole home says *waiting for something that already happened.* You open the laptop that is not yours, on a site that is not anybody's, and the wheel is already spinning before you've admitted why.

The coin leaves your thumb.

You feel it go — the small release at the pad of your thumb, the flick you didn't do but your hand remembers doing — and then the water. Green light coming up through it wrong, like the whole fountain is lit from a screen underneath instead of the sky above. The splash folds in on itself instead of out. Your knees are the first thing you notice: they ache in a specific, permanent way that has nothing to do with the last ten seconds and everything to do with the last ten years. A gut sits against the waistband of cargo shorts, warm, familiar in a way that isn't yours yet. Green eyes. Somebody else's eyes, and you're looking out through them at a coin already gone, sinking, and a mall closing down around you in soft amber pockets of light between the dead green.

The shirt is what opens first — the plain cotton of it dragging faint against your back when you shift your weight, and it comes with a whole morning: Gregory standing in front of the closet at six-forty, Linda already in the shower, deciding between the blue tee and a polo he'd have to iron, and choosing the blue tee because today didn't matter, today was just a day, an ordinary Thursday where nothing was going to ask anything hard of him. He'd pulled it over his head the way he always does, arms up, elbows out, a small grunt at the top because his shoulders don't love that motion anymore. He'd looked in the mirror for exactly as long as it takes to confirm nothing was wrong with his face and then stopped looking, because looking had stopped being interesting sometime in his forties.

The wedding band is next, worn smooth, and it comes in heavier than the shirt — nineteen years of it, a wedding in a church that smelled like candle wax and his mother-in-law's perfume, Linda's face doing the thing it does when she's trying not to cry in public and losing. Three kids since then, loud enough that this fountain, this ten minutes of quiet before driving home, is the best part of some days and he isn't proud of that but it's true. The ring has a groove worn into the finger under it now, a soft dent that will be there even if the ring comes off. It's been on so long it isn't a decision anymore, it's just weather.

The office comes through the ID badge you're not holding but remember clipping on that morning, the glass walls of it, the door he always leaves open because a closed door makes people at their desks nervous and he remembers what that felt like when he was the one at the desk. Twenty-two years climbing to *mid-level* and making peace with the ceiling of that word. He is decent at it. Nobody would say more than decent and he has stopped needing them to.

And under the shirt and under the ring there is a woman who is not Linda, a name that comes up soft and a little guilty even now, months after — Priya, and the particular ache of ending something that hadn't been *wrong* exactly, just alive in a way his marriage had stopped being for a while, and the fountain water going green under the closing-time lights is the same color, almost, as a bar sign outside a restaurant where they said goodbye for good four months ago, and he'd told himself the wish tonight wouldn't be about her and it was going to be about her anyway.

The coin was for something ordinary. He doesn't remember what, now — you don't either, it's already gone, the way wishes go the second they leave the hand — but the shape of the feeling holds: *let something be easy for once.* His knees. His youngest kid's school thing next week that he already knows he'll be late for. Fifty years old and his body carrying it exactly the way fifty feels, thick through the middle, strong still in the forearms from nothing in particular, bald head cool under the mall's white light, jaw clean-shaven that morning with a careful, unhurried hand because Gregory has always liked that ten minutes, the razor, the quiet, the one part of the day that belongs only to him.

You stand at the lip of the fountain in his shorts, his shirt, his ring, his going-on-fifty knees, and none of it is unbearable. None of it is even bad. That's the thing nobody tells you about the wheel — most of them aren't bad. Most of them are just a whole life, sturdy and specific, that was never going to be yours until it was.

You look down at your hands — his hands, thick fingers, the ring catching the last of the green light — and you turn them over once, like checking they're real.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, to the empty end of the mall. "Okay, Gregory."

You don't know yet how long you'll let this one run.