Kevin Otani

The welding rod is still hot when you set it down, and Ruben Casillas's hand does it with the ease of a man who has done it ten thousand times, an ease that is not yours and never was. You have had him thirty-one days. Long enough to know his hand aches in the mornings, that his back has a permanent argument with him about bending, that he keeps a photograph of a woman named Alicia taped inside his locker and does not look at it if he can help it. Long enough to be bored of him. That is the shameful part, the part you would not say out loud even in the shop with nobody in it — that a whole man, his marriage, his hands, his forty-one years, wore thin on you like a shirt worn one time too many. You wipe your face with his forearm. You think: not tonight. You think: yes, tonight. You pull up the site on the phone with his cracked screen and his thumbprint, because it is easier than admitting the real reason, which is only that the wheel is there and you are restless and restlessness has always been reason enough.

You spin.

The leash is real in the hand before the hand is yours. Nylon-woven grip, worn shiny at the pad of the thumb. A dog at the far end of it, black, snub-nosed, sniffing at a hedge like the hedge owes it something. The light is going long and gold across a sidewalk in a suburb you have never stood on, and there is a weight to this body that Ruben Casillas's did not have — shorter through the torso, softer in the middle, a looseness in the shoulders like a man who used to be more careful with them and stopped. The leash goes slack. You feel the retracting mechanism click twice under your finger before you decide to reel it in, and the dog looks back at you with its ears going flat, reading something in the stride before you've finished learning it yourself.

The shirt is what opens first. Plaid flannel, cotton gone soft with a hundred washes, the cuffs rolled to the forearm because he always rolls them, some fussy habit from basic training that never left him even off-post — sleeves rolled to exact thirds, mother's habit, drill sergeant's habit, doesn't matter which, it's his hands doing it this morning in a room with the blinds still down, humming something with no name to it. Kevin Otani. The name arrives with the shirt's collar against the back of your neck, and behind it comes the rest, unbidden, the way water comes through a cracked window.

The barracks smell, early, cold tile, a whole life measured out in formation and boot polish and men who called him by his last name for nineteen years. He is good at this — the body under your hands right now knows how to stand at parade rest without being told, knows how to fold a shirt into a nine-inch square, knows how to sit very still while someone yells, because none of that costs him anything. What costs him is smaller. A man named Desmond who kissed him for the first time behind a rec center in Yuma and how frightened they both were doing it, twelve years ago, before either of them had the language for what they were, and how that fright has never fully left him even now that he doesn't need it to. An ex-husband, Marcus, who he still calls on his birthday, a marriage that ended without much drama, the way things end when two people stop fighting for the same thing. A daughter, six years old, who lives with her mother two suburbs over and who he sees on the weekends the Army allows him, and who last week drew him with too many fingers on one hand and he kept the drawing anyway, taped inside a footlocker like it was something that could be salvaged.

The shorts against your legs bring back this morning specifically — not some abstract morning but this one, hours ago in his clock, the boyfriend still sleeping when he pulled these on, khaki cargo, a little tight now around a stomach that used to be flatter before thirty-seven happened to it. Rey. The boyfriend's name comes with the smell of his own bed, sheets he didn't change yet, a mug he didn't wash. Rey who doesn't like the dog, tolerates the dog, walks the dog anyway on the mornings Kevin has PT too early to do it himself. New Balance sneakers, worn soft in the heel from years of formation runs before dawn — his feet know this pavement the way his hands know a rifle, which is to say without thought, which is a mercy today because thought is the one thing you are not giving him.

A pack of cigarettes rides in his shirt pocket, half gone, and just touching the shape of it through the cotton brings back the taste of the first one after a bad week, and how he only smokes the number he smokes and never talks about it and nobody in his unit has ever seen him without a lighter, though he goes weeks without using either. He drinks almost never — a wedding, a funeral, the night the divorce was final and even then only two — and something in him, some old temple-quiet thing from his mother's house, some folded-hands habit, keeps him from wanting more than that. He is not devout. He is careful, which is a different kind of faith and maybe the only kind that survives deployment.

The dog tugs. Small thing, warm, low to the ground, some rescue mutt Rey picked out without asking and Kevin loved anyway within a week. Its ears are still back. It knows.

You look down at the hand holding the leash — thick-fingered, calloused across three knuckles from a rifle you have never held, a thin white scar of nothing significant across one thumb, a hand that has made a bed eleven thousand mornings running and always will one more time whether you're in it or not — and you turn it over like it might have an answer written on the palm.

You look up, into the low gold light, past the hedge, toward wherever a camera would be if there were one.

"Guess I've got the leash now," you say, and it comes out of Kevin Otani's mouth easy, like a joke he'd have made himself, if he were still the one making it.