Kevin Tanabe

Gordon Maslanka's condo has good light at eleven in the morning, which is one of the reasons Gordon Maslanka bought it, and you have been standing in that good light for forty seconds hating every part of him. Not hating, exactly. Outgrowing. The gray-silver hair that photographs so well for the listings. The gut he calls a dad bod like it's charming. The knees that ache going down the stairs to the lobby. Sixty years in a body is a long time to carry around even when it isn't yours, and you have had it less than a minute and already you are thinking about the wheel, because that is what you do now, that is the whole shape of you: a want that resets. Somewhere behind Gordon's eyes, in the part of you that is still counting, this will be five hundred seventy-six. You don't decide so much as notice you're already walking toward the laptop on the kitchen island, the page already loaded from last night, the wheel already spinning under your thumb before the justification catches up to the motion. You tell yourself it's because Gordon has a closing at one and you don't want to sit through it. That's not it either. It never really is.

The leash goes slack in your hand and a dog looks up at you.

Not the New York light. A different light, lower, more gold, coming down between rowhouses instead of glass towers, and a hedge in front of you smells like something the dog has found infinitely interesting. Your hand — this hand, size you haven't worn in this exact configuration before, olive knuckles, a thin white scar you didn't put there — has stopped walking. The dog's ears go back. It knows before it knows anything, the way dogs do. You wind the leash twice around your palm, an old habit that isn't yours yet but that your hand performs anyway, muscle ahead of memory, and you start walking again at a pace the dog has to scramble to match.

The shirt is the first door. Green cotton, soft from a hundred washes, and it opens on a Tuesday— no, this Tuesday, a few hours before, Kevin standing in front of a dresser in an apartment two floors above a laundromat on a street where the trash pickup is Thursdays. He pulled this shirt over his head still damp from the shower, still thinking about Marcus Webb's double-leg, how the kid keeps dropping his elbow, how you fix that without breaking the kid's confidence two weeks before regionals. The shorts came next, cargo, chosen because they have the pocket that holds his phone flat against his thigh without the outline showing, a vanity so small it's almost sweet. He clipped the leash onto Biscuit's collar with his knee on the floor of the hallway, the dog already spinning in place, and he laughed, actually laughed out loud alone in his own hallway, because the dog does this every single day and it never stops being funny to him.

The whistle. There isn't one on him now, but your palm remembers the weight of it anyway, cold against the sternum in the gym forty minutes across town, hanging over a sleeveless hoodie that says STORM WRESTLING in cracked block letters, worn so many times the fabric under the arms has gone thin and gray-soft. That hoodie is the door to everything else. Under it, the tattoo on the upper arm — the cross, the praying hands — inked nine years ago in a shop on Passyunk the week his grandmother died, done in a single sitting because he wanted the pain to mean something and it did, it still does, he touches it sometimes mid-sentence talking to a kid about discipline and doesn't know he's doing it. The little silver hoop in his ear is nothing, a dare from college he never bothered to undo. Under all of it, twelve years of a mat's smell that never fully leaves a person — rubber and old sweat and the disinfectant they mop it with — and a body that knows exactly how much force it takes to sprawl a leg out before the brain finishes the thought.

There was a woman. Renata. Four years, an apartment they almost signed a lease on together, and it ended not with a fight but with a long quiet Sunday where they both understood something before either said it. He still has her number. He has never once used it, not out of anger, out of something closer to respect for whatever it was. Sometimes on a bad night, alone, the reflux keeps him up worse than the memory does — an orange prescription bottle on the bathroom sink, a diet he's supposed to follow and mostly doesn't, a hand that reaches for water at 2 a.m. out of old habit rather than faith, because faith for him is not the bottle or the church he stopped going to but something looser, something he still believes in without needing a building for it.

The pen. Not on him now either, but the ghost of it is in the fingers — the little click-click-click he does at his desk grading lineup sheets, a tic so old he doesn't hear it anymore, and the assistant coaches tease him for it every single season like it's new.

Biscuit tugs. The leash is real in your hand, nylon and warm from another palm's grip a second ago, and the weight of the dog's want travels up your arm the way it must have traveled up his a thousand mornings before this one, except this is not his morning anymore.

You look down at your own hand wound twice in retractable cord, olive-skinned, a little rope-burn callus at the base of two fingers you didn't earn. You turn it over once, like checking it's real, then look up — not at the dog, past it, into whatever is watching.

"Sorry, buddy," you say, and you're not sure yet if you mean the dog.