Marcos Villalobos

Nadim's hands are not your hands, and three minutes in you already know you hate them — soft where they should be sure, the once-broken nose sitting crooked in a face that keeps trying to arrange itself into comfort you didn't ask for. You are standing in his study, Houston going amber and heavy outside the window, a sermon half-written on the screen behind you in a font too big for a man who claims his eyes are fine. His body wants to sit down. It has wanted to sit down since you arrived. Somewhere in this man is a whole congregation who loves him, and you have been him for three minutes and already you can feel the shape of what they love, and it is not for you. You did not come back for him. You came back because 154 was enough of him and the itch under that is the only honesty in this: you do not linger anywhere lately. You open the laptop, not his — yours, the site's white page with its slow wheel over-and-over rendering, and you pay again, because the wanting doesn't ask permission, and you spin.

The trailer's fluorescent tube ticks once overhead. Your hand — his hand — is flat on a stapled printout, mid-reach for the stapler, and the reach goes wrong, fingers closing on air a half-inch short, and then again, slow, correct, like a man relearning a door he's opened ten thousand times. You are heavier here, low and dense through the gut, weight sitting different than Nadim's thin softness — this is muscle gone comfortable, not muscle gone to nothing. Stubble rasps faintly against the collar when you swallow. Outside the window past the second monitor, sagebrush runs pale to a line of hills wearing early-afternoon light like a blade. Your — his — chin has a groove in it you can feel with your tongue, an odd intimacy, the first physical thing that says this is a different face.

The cardigan is against your forearms first, and it comes in soft: a Tuesday morning, this exact sweater going on over the checked shirt because Rosa said the office runs cold this time of year and she was right, she is always quietly right about small things, and the memory of her saying it arrives with the particular warmth of a marriage that has stopped needing to prove itself. Sleeve, then sleeve, buttons done from the bottom up out of habit from some job twenty years gone. The wedding band is next — you feel it as weight before you feel it as meaning, and then the meaning comes anyway: eleven years, a courthouse, her hand shaking worse than his. Two kids' names arrive without their faces quite resolving — a boy's height chalked on a doorframe, a girl laughing at something that isn't funny, just to be near him. None of it is far. None of it is dramatic. That's the ache of it.

The boots bring the drive in — forty minutes each way through country that looks like it's been sanded down to the bone, a commute he stopped resenting years ago because the quiet of it is its own kind of paycheck. The desk under your palms brings the job: fifteen years of numbers that add up because he makes them add up, twice, out of a carefulness that isn't fear so much as a promise kept to nobody in particular. Somewhere in there, faint, an old girlfriend's name attached to a feeling more like weather than longing — a door he closed so long ago the hinges don't even creak when memory pushes it. He does not drink much. He has never smoked. His fingers, even now, want to drum against the desk edge, an idle rhythm his body runs without him, and you let them, once, twice, before you catch it and stop.

You look down at the hand doing it. Thick fingers, a plain gold band, a paper cut healing pink along one knuckle that isn't yours and never will be explained to you. You turn the hand over like it might tell you something the man wouldn't.

"Okay," you say to the empty trailer, to the fluorescent light, to whoever isn't listening. "Let's see how long you last."