Kyle Petrakis

—

Héctor's knuckles ache before you even close the fist all the way, and that's the thing that decides it, more than anything you'd say to the wife you don't have or the boss you'll never meet. Fifty-two years of somebody else's cartilage. You've had him less than a minute and already you know the shape of the rest of the day: door duty, cold rain probably, the flat nose that stopped being his own decision decades before you arrived in it, a knee that clicks on the stairs. You paid for a big man and got a tired one. New York afternoon light coming gray through the stairwell window. You are not unhappy, exactly. You are already gone in your head, which is the same thing, in your business.

You open vessel.cards on a phone that isn't going to be yours in ten more seconds and you spin anyway, the way you always do, before the wanting has even finished arriving — because stopping to name it would mean admitting there's no bottom to it.

The canal breaks off him mid-step. You are the one who catches it.

Not a stumble that lands — his foot finds the concrete a half-beat late, weight already leaning where the body meant to go, and something recalibrates underneath you that you didn't do yourself. Cold air first. Then the fact of running — actual running, lungs already working, a stranger's cardiovascular effort you didn't ask for and now owe. Earbuds feeding a voice mid-sentence about pace. A watch on the left wrist buzzing once, confused, logging a split against nobody's history. Dawn coming up pink and wet off the canal. Your — his — breath is showing.

The shirt is what opens first, because it's against your back and it's been against his back three hundred mornings the same way: gray, thin, the kind that wicks. You get the bedroom before you get anything else — dark at 5:40, the wife's shape turned away under the sheet, the click of the watch face lighting as he pulled it off the nightstand charger. Getting dressed comes back to you in his hands, not yours: the shirt over the head first, always, then shorts, socks pulled snug at the ankle because loose socks are how you get blisters at mile three, an old lesson from an old injury you can almost taste, some pulled hamstring two summers back that made him careful ever since. The shoes double-knotted. He does everything to a system. He has always done everything to a system, since before you were the one running it.

The wedding band is next, small and dumb and constant against the third finger, tapping the water bottle in the memory of yesterday's shift, tapping the bar rail, tapping absolutely everything, because his leg never stops bouncing and neither does this hand when it isn't holding a shaker or a pour spout. You get the bar in pieces — the smell of well liquor before opening, citrus rinds in a bin, a rolled towel over the shoulder just like the gray one that lived there in another version of this same collarbone. You get customers who tip badly and a manager who likes him fine. You get, underneath it, the drink that isn't behind the bar but is in him regardless — the six beers that became eight, becoming a thing his wife has started saying out loud in the kitchen with the light off so the neighbors won't hear through the summer screens. You get the ex-girlfriend, not far behind that, a name that surfaces without asking to: a woman from before the wife, someone he still, on certain nights, google-searches and closes the tab on, ashamed, a small leak in an otherwise sealed hull. You get the blood pressure cuff on the bathroom counter, the number that scared the doctor a little, the number he lies to himself about weekly. You get none of this in order. You get it the way water finds a low place — the shirt gives the marriage, the shoe gives the run, the ring gives the guilt, all of it arriving with his feeling soldered onto it, grief and love and low simmering dread that aren't yours but sit in your chest as if they were rented.

The body under all of it is thirty-five and honest about it: quads that know this exact canal path without supervision, a stride that has run this loop enough dawns to not need the watch except for pride, lungs a little tight in a way eight beers a night will do to a man who used to not need to think about it. Nothing hurts yet. Everything will, eventually, the way it always does for a man his age who drinks like that and pretends the run cancels it out.

Your foot finds the ground again. The stumble never happened, technically. The watch keeps running its clock.

You slow to a stop at the rail overlooking the water, chest working, and you hold your left hand up in front of your face — his hand, the ring catching gray dawn light, the leg still going underneath you even standing still, jittering like it forgot to be told to quit — and you turn it over once, twice, like it might mean something written on the palm.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to nobody, breath fogging. "Okay."

Somewhere behind you a sprinkler kicks on along somebody's yard. You don't know yet if this is a body you keep past breakfast.