Manuel Otis

You are Marcus Delaine for four minutes and that is long enough to know it was a mistake. The consultant's condo has a view of the river and a kitchen island the size of a car hood, and none of it is yours, not really, not the way anything is ever yours on the wheel — but even borrowed it should feel like something, and instead you are standing at the window in a body that is heavy in the wrong places, a gray-silver beard itching at a jaw that isn't tired enough yet to have earned it, and you cannot find one reason to want to keep being him. Nothing happened to you in here. That's the trouble. Four minutes and no one has said a word to you, the phone on the counter hasn't buzzed, the whiskey glass he apparently likes to leave out is dry, and Chicago outside the window is just Tuesday doing what Tuesday does at the end of a day nobody will remember. You did not come back to the site because Marcus Delaine wronged you. You came back because he was boring, and boredom, on the hundred and fifty-ninth spin, has become its own kind of hunger. You set the glass down. You did not even taste it. You open the site on his phone with his own thumbprint, which still amuses you a little, and you spin.

The television goes bright — too bright, a commercial cutting in hard — and you are sitting up straight on a couch that exhales dust under you, in a dark room that smells like carpet and someone's dinner two hours cooled. A remote is loose against your palm, buttons soft with wear, and you feel the shape of a body that has been used for sixty-five years: the low ache low in the back that isn't pain exactly, more like a bill still owed, the give of a belly that carpentry and grief and Sunday dinners built together, feet loose in slippers, one hand resting on your own knee because the leg under it will not sit still, has not sat still since you don't know when, bouncing now, a small tremor you didn't order it to do. On the screen the show has cut to something you were laughing at a second ago, in a life you don't own yet, and you don't laugh now. You just watch, mouth flat, waiting to know who you are.

It comes in through the shirt first — a work shirt, but this isn't the shirt, this is a soft short-sleeved thing with a faded tropical print, buttons done wrong by one, and touching the collar with your chin drops you into a Sunday two years back, him standing in front of the bedroom mirror doing the buttons over because Rosa said so from the hallway, laughing at him, you look like you dressed in the dark, and the dimples come up on his face — your face now — the same way they always do, without him trying, an old joke his face tells on its own. You feel where the wedding band sits on your left hand, worn thin on the inside from thirty-one years of a wrench turning against it, and that's a whole afternoon by itself: the courthouse, her family driving up from Piedras Negras in two cars, him twenty-three and terrified and so sure. Underneath that, quieter, an ex-wife's name arrives with no warmth and no anger either, just a door that closed a long time ago and stayed closed, and a son — one, grown, living in Fort Worth, calls on Sundays, doesn't call enough, calls enough — that flickers through and is gone before you can hold it.

Your feet are in slippers on a carpet that remembers a hundred evenings like this one, and that brings the job up through the floor: the smell of the shop before this shirt, Manuel's Auto, his own name on his own building for eleven years now, the particular satisfaction of a stubborn bolt finally giving, the rag that lives in his back pocket even when he isn't wearing it, the studs in both earlobes that Rosa picked out for him at a flea market in Oak Cliff the year they got married, small enough that nobody at the shop ever teases him for it twice. The money is in there too, oddly weightless — the shop did better than anyone expected, some land sold at the right time, and none of it changed the couch, none of it changed the slippers, he just sits here same as always, remote loose, leg going. Church on Sunday, a beer at somebody's birthday, nothing stronger, never smoked, never wanted to. His body knows all of this without asking you: the shoulder that clicks when he reaches overhead, forearms stronger than the rest of him from thirty years of leverage, hands that know a torque wrench's weight the way other men know a handshake. He is, underneath everything, a comfortable man in a dark room at the end of an ordinary Tuesday, and nothing was wrong with his evening, which is exactly why you are in it.

You look down at your hands — his hands, blunt and clean tonight, a little swollen at the knuckle, the band catching the last color off the window — turn the left one over like it might tell you something it hasn't already, and you feel the leg keep bouncing on its own under you, an engine that never got the message that the car stopped.

"Huh," you say, to the empty room, in his voice, and it comes out sounding almost like him laughing at something, though nothing on the screen was funny at all.