Kyle Hendershot

Juan Delacruz's phone is warm in your borrowed hand, the sales floor emptying out behind glass doors at closing, and you are already sick of him. Three minutes old in this body — nineteen, dimples, a good haircut, black hair that falls right without trying — and you can feel exactly what it wants to feel: quota met, boss's text answered, a girl to text back later. Fine muscle doing fine things. It is Wednesday evening in Philadelphia and the light through the dealership windows is going orange, and none of it is enough. Sixty-eight men and you already know the tell — it isn't the body, it's the itch that arrives inside any body after long enough sitting still in it. You open the browser instead of the group chat. vessel.cards loads the way it always loads, patient, a wheel on a gray field, and you spin before you can talk yourself out of it, the way you always do, and somewhere a phone you'll never see again finishes dying in Juan's pocket.

The television cuts to a bright frame — a commercial, a burst of white light — and in that half second you are sitting up straight on a couch that is not the one you knew a moment ago, and the remote is already down on the cushion arm as if you'd meant to put it there. Weight settles into you wrong-side heavy, low in the gut, a man's whole afternoon of sitting caught in the hips and lower back. The room smells like microwave popcorn gone cold and the particular hot-dust smell of a swamp cooler working too hard against a desert afternoon outside. Wednesday, but the sun through the blinds is flat and white and high, nothing like the orange you just left. Somebody else's shift clock, not yours.

The couch fabric under your — his — forearm gives you the first flash: Saturdays, boots off, kids climbing over the arm of it to get to him. Gone before you can hold it. You look down without meaning to and there's a belly under a navy t-shirt, softer than Juan's ever was, and a wedding band, plain gold, catching the TV light. Touching it — you don't mean to, your thumb finds it on its own, the way a hand finds a habit — and it opens up warm and sudden: a courthouse in Pahrump, a woman in a yellow sundress laughing because neither of them had rehearsed anything to say, his mother crying about it later on the phone for reasons that were happier than they sounded. Nine years gone by like nothing.

The couch arm again, the worn place where the fabric's gone shiny — and that's the picking job coming up through your palm, aisles of racking taller than a man, the forklift's beep-beep-beep somewhere behind you that never fully leaves his ears even at home, his lower back seizing on a Tuesday two years back when a case shifted wrong on the pull and he caught it instead of letting it drop, because dropping it meant redoing the count, and it never healed exactly right after that, a dull hot wire down the left side whenever he stands too long. It's not paining you now, sitting, but you can feel where it lives, waiting.

His right arm is heavier than the left, not from muscle — from the sleeve. Black-and-gray ink, a woman's face worked into scrollwork and shading he sat through four separate Saturdays for, in Reno, driving two hours each way with a case of nicotine pouches in the cup holder and gas station coffee because he'd quit drinking three years before that and needed something to do with his hands and his mouth on long drives. The face in the tattoo isn't his wife. It's his mother, from a photograph taken before he was born, and he never explained that to anyone at the plant who asked, just let them think what they wanted.

The shirt against your back gives you this morning, sleeve by sleeve — no, not this morning, some morning, all of them folded into one: him pulling this exact shirt off a hanger in a trailer bedroom with barely room to turn around in, the AC unit rattling, his wife already up and gone to drop the kids, him checking the shoulder seam for a stain before he decided it'd do for a day off. Off today. That's why the lights were down and the show was running and a bag of chips sat open on the coffee table — a day off, mid-shift for nobody, just a man resting his back in the flat desert afternoon while his body quietly kept its own bill of hurts. Two kids, a boy and a girl, whose noise you can feel the shape of in the room even with them elsewhere — a school day, a trailer that is briefly, uncharacteristically, quiet.

You feel how little there is that anyone would point to and call it: not looks, not a story, not a wound anyone can see. Just a man, sunk into a couch, holding still the way people hold still who have learned that nothing much happens if you wait it out. It should feel like nothing. It doesn't. Something in it is real in a way Juan's whole gleaming nineteen years wasn't, and you don't like knowing that, three minutes after leaving him for this.

You look at your hands — his hands, blunt-fingered, a callus map you didn't earn, the band catching light again — turn them over once like you're checking they're the same ones, and lift your eyes to find nothing in front of you but the muted TV throwing its colors across the dark room.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one who is listening, "let's see how long you last."