Lowell Garrity

It's the middle of the morning where you are, a Wednesday, and you have told yourself this is a dull one, nothing on, the kind of morning that gets you clicking into places you shouldn't. You have wanted this for years — not an idea, a hunger, a thing you read about at two a.m. under different names, forums that went quiet and started up again somewhere else. Waking up as somebody else. You never thought anyone would figure out how to sell it. Then there was a wheel on a screen, gaudy as a slot machine, and a card reader field, and a button that just said SPIN, and you thought: fine. Let it take my money and nothing else. You are a person at a screen and nothing more than that, not even to yourself, and you press it anyway.

It is early evening somewhere else, the end of a Tuesday, high desert Nevada, and you are sitting on a couch you have never owned, in a body that has thirty more years on it than you expected to feel, in a dark room with blue-white light crawling over the backs of your — his — hands. The remote is loose in his grip. There was a laugh building in his chest a half-second ago, you can feel the muscle memory of it in his cheeks, in the moustache pulling, and then the show cuts to something brighter on screen and the laugh just doesn't arrive. You sit up straighter instead. You set the remote down on the arm of the couch, carefully, like someone handling something that isn't his.

You are Lowell Garrity, though you don't know that yet, not in words. It comes in through his hands.

The couch leather is worn smooth under his palm, cool then warming, and from it comes a flash: him at the end of a long shift, dropping into this exact cushion, boots still on, too tired to care, Denise's voice from the kitchen asking if he wants the chicken reheated or if he's going to let it sit there getting sad on the stove again. The flash widens. Denise — second wife, not the one who still turns up in his chest when a certain song comes on the truck radio, that's Carol, ex-wife, nine years gone and still somehow present at every Thanksgiving because of the kids. Two of them, grown, out of the house, a son in Reno who calls more than the daughter does, and that is fine, he tells himself that is fine, a thing you can feel he has told himself so many times it has worn a groove.

The flannel against your back gives you more — rough cotton gone soft at the elbows, a shirt he's owned since before the second marriage, and underneath it a shoulder that aches on the left side, low and dull, the kind of ache that has a name now, something the doctor called it, something he didn't fully listen to because he had a quarter panel waiting on a lift. His hands — thin-fingered, nicked along the knuckles in a dozen small white lines you can feel more than see, permanent gray ghosted into the creases of his palms no amount of orange scrub ever lifts all the way out — know things without being told. They know the weight of a sanding block before they know anything else about themselves. They know the particular drag of primer under 400-grit, the difference between a panel that's ready and one that still needs another pass, by feel, in the dark, without looking.

This morning — his morning, a day and a half gone now by the clock but close as skin — comes back through the shirt sleeve-by-sleeve: standing in the single-wide's narrow bedroom, hard blue shadow already laid long across the sagebrush outside the window, buttoning this same gray work shirt over a gray undershirt gone soft from washing, the ring catching once on the second button the way it always does, the way it's caught for eleven years, his and Denise's, a small gold insistence he barely notices until it snags. He pulled the belt one notch tighter than it used to go. He did not look long in the mirror. He touched his jaw once, out of habit, checking a shave that didn't need checking, the way his hand goes to his face a dozen times a day without him sending it there — an old tic, maybe from the smoking, eleven years quit and the hand still forgetting.

There's a Wednesday off coming — no, there's nothing, it's just evening, the shop closed, primer dust still ghosted pale in the hollows of his wrists even now, under this flannel, because he didn't scrub hard enough before he sat down. There's a beer he didn't finish on the side table — one, maybe heading for a second, that's the rhythm most nights, not a problem, just a shape the day takes. There's a church he doesn't go to anymore but still believes something, out past the lot lights, about why a man ends up exactly where he ends up.

You feel how tired this body is in a way that isn't sickness, just fifty-nine years of standing on concrete. Skinny through the frame, strength gone stringy and specific — in the forearms, in the grip — rather than broad. Thinning hair he dyes flat brown, gray coming back in fast at the roots the way it always does three weeks after Denise does it for him at the kitchen sink. None of this is design. It's maintenance, same as the car.

You look down. His hands, your hands now, veined, spotted faintly at the back, the band of gold dull under the TV's blue wash. You turn the left one over slowly, like you've never seen a hand do that before, because you haven't — not from inside one.

You lift your eyes to the dark window across the room, which is close enough to a lens, and you say, quiet, not for anyone: "Didn't think it'd actually work."

Somewhere behind that there's a second thought, no shape to it yet, no date on it — just the knowledge, already sitting there like a key left in a pocket, that there's a wheel waiting, and you don't know yet how long you'll let Lowell Garrity's evening go on being yours.