Liam Osterhoff

You're standing in Ricardo Fonseca's kitchen at eleven at night, still buzzing with the newness of him — the scar through the eyebrow, the good knee, the way his voice comes out lower than you expect every single time — and you already know you're going back. Not because Ricardo is broken. He's fine. Sixty-one and strong and kind, a man who spends his days talking people down off ledges they built themselves, and there is something in that you could have respected, if respect were the kind of thing you still did. But four minutes in he cracked his own knuckles without thinking about it, out of habit, some other man's habit worn into muscle you're only borrowing, and it startled you — the reminder that you're never actually new, only ever newly dressed. Twenty-two men deep and the seams still show. So you open the laptop on his counter, the cursor already blinking on vessel.cards from whenever he — you — last closed the lid, and you spin because you always spin, because the wanting is not about Ricardo and never was.

The wheel lands and there's no seam at all, just the truck under your boots and the cold ladder-rail biting your palm and a bag of somebody's garbage swinging into the hopper from your other hand, mid-arc. Your breath comes out white. It's early, it's wet, sodium light pooling on brownstone brick, and your body — heavy, warm, blond hair thinning back into an M you can feel in the wind on your scalp — takes one more step wrong, hitches, then corrects. The bag lands square. The next nine land square too, checked, each one, though nothing here has needed checking in years.

The glove is what opens him first — stiff leather, sweat-cured, molded to a grip that isn't yours yet but wants to be. A flash: this same glove, six years newer, his hand closing around a coffee cup at a diner counter at five forty in the morning, Denise across from him already dressed for her own shift, the two of them married eleven years by then and still doing this, still getting up in the dark together for different jobs on opposite ends of the day. You feel the specific, unglamorous love of that — two people awake for each other on no sleep, out of habit, out of something better than habit.

The rail under your hand gives you the truck itself, ten thousand mornings of it, the diesel smell that used to make him sick the first winter and now means nothing, means work, means the check that comes Friday. Under your feet, the wet steel step, and beneath that a whole geography of this same three-mile route — which stoop has the loose railing, which building's super leaves out cigarettes for whoever wants them, which corner smells like the bakery two doors down starting its ovens at this hour.

The tape on your sleeve, rolled twice, gives you the morning you got this exact shirt — cheap, itchy, a size too small in the shoulders when it was new, broken in now, orange gone the color of rust from a hundred washes. You remember pulling it on in a bathroom with the fan broken, Denise still asleep, the boys' door shut down the hall — Liam and his brother, and you understand with a lurch which one the tattoo is for, the older one, the one born in a bad month that got good fast, LIAM 2012 in a script he picked out himself at nineteen for the first son he ever had, on an arm that was thinner then. The band on your left hand — his left hand — is warm from his own skin, and it gives you nothing dramatic, just years, just a woman he still thinks got a raw deal marrying a guy who'd rather run trucks than run anything bigger, and the other one, the one before Denise, the one who left for Ohio and a better job and who he still, at thirty-nine, sometimes almost calls when he's had a bad week, and never does.

Your knees know this step. Your shoulders know this weight, this particular ache that sets in around 9 a.m. and lives there till the shift ends. Your knuckles want cracking and you let them, out of a habit that isn't performance, that nobody taught you, that is simply his.

You look at your hands — his hands, freckled, thick-fingered, one gloved and one bare where he'd stripped it a second ago for a better grip — and you turn the bare one over in the sodium light like it might tell you something it hasn't already.

"Hell of a Wednesday," you say, out loud, to no one, in his voice, and you don't know yet if you mean it as him or as yourself, and there is no one standing on this wet street who could tell the difference either way.