Marcos Villareal

The Reginald body sleeps sitting up, or almost — you're the one who kept it awake, in the recliner in the dark den, laptop light on your gray-stubbled jaw, Friday bleeding toward Saturday and nobody in the house to notice the hour. It's a good body. Heavy in the shoulders, a manager's soft hands, a cleft chin you liked the first time you saw it in the bathroom mirror. Nine hundred fifty-two men behind you and this one had health insurance and a corner office and you thought that would be enough to sit still in for a while. It wasn't boredom exactly. It was the specific itch of a Friday night with nothing in it, a silence in a house that isn't yours and never will be no matter how long you stay, and the wheel sitting there in a browser tab like a lit window in a street of dark ones. You tell yourself you're just looking. You are already not just looking. The card flips before you've finished deciding, the way it always does, because deciding and spinning stopped being two different things a long time ago.

The kitchen light is a bad yellow, the kind that makes a dirty countertop look worse than it is. There's a coat still on your shoulders, warm from outside, and a fork in your hand halfway to a mouth that is not the mouth you had a second ago — thinner, a beard on it, cold air still clinging to the collar. The fork stops. It comes back down onto the lip of the container with a small, decisive click, like someone else set it there. You feel your own shoulders shrug the coat off without asking you first, feel a body that is shorter and lighter than the one you left, feel a hunger in it that isn't performance, it's just Friday and a long day behind it. You sit. You eat the rest in even mouthfuls, looking at nothing in the black square of the window, and somewhere behind your eyes a whole man is still arriving.

The coat comes off the shoulders and lands over the chair, and touching the sleeve on the way down gives you a flash — a truck heater on full blast, radio turned low, the smell of cut pine still in the fabric — and then more, a whole day: framing a great room out on the Miller property, the smell of sawdust hanging gold in a shaft of window light, the particular ache low in the back that comes from bending over a chalk line forty times before lunch. Marcos. The name comes up out of the shirt itself, out of the collar damp at the neck, the way a name comes up out of a job site when the foreman calls it across two floors of open studs. Thirty-five years doing this, since he was nineteen and his tío put a hammer in his hand and told him a house was just a promise you kept one nail at a time.

The fork is heavier in this hand than it should be, calloused across two fingers in a way that has nothing to do with eating — the second and third fingers of the right hand, the exact place a tape measure's hook bites when you're careless pulling it fast. That callus remembers itself. The wrist remembers a nail gun's kick, absorbed a thousand times until it isn't absorbed anymore, just accepted, like weather. The lower back, when you shift on the stool, sends up its familiar bill for today's invoice — for last week's, for the week before that, going back fifteen years to a knee that was young once. Skinny build carrying more than skinny builds are supposed to, and it's carried it anyway, every day, uncomplaining, because complaining doesn't frame a wall.

The ring finger of the left hand is bare and cool where a band isn't, a pale stripe against summer-tanned skin, and touching it with the thumb — an old, unconscious gesture, done a hundred times a day without him noticing he's doing it — brings back the actual ring itself, gone eight months now, sold or lost or just put away in a drawer he doesn't open. Her name arrives sideways, the way exes do, through the ring and not through anything sharper: Selena, who left in spring, who he still texts sometimes at midnight and deletes before sending, who is not the wife — the wife is older history, quieter now, a different grief gone smooth — but the more recent one, the one that still has teeth. He thinks of her while he chews. He always does around this hour, when the house is his and too quiet in it, one plate instead of two, the container instead of a real dinner because cooking for one still doesn't feel worth the pots.

The window gives nothing back but his own reflection ghosted over the dark yard, and in it, standing there in the coat he's already shrugged half off, you can feel the whole small town holding still around this kitchen — the one stoplight two blocks over cycling red to green to red for nobody, the diner on Main dark and for-lease since March, work in the morning on a job an hour off because the phone doesn't ring the way it used to for men like him in a town like this. Thirty-five and skinny and tired and worth, on paper, less than the truck he drives, and none of that is a complaint sitting in him, exactly — it's just Friday, and food, and a window with nothing in it, and a ring he isn't wearing anymore turning, out of habit, between two fingers that already know the shape of it by heart even with it gone.

You look down. The hand on the counter is thin, brown, nicked white in two places along the knuckles, half-moons of grime worked into the nail beds no scrubbing gets all the way out. You turn it over, palm up, and the calluses sit there where he left them, earned and not yours, and something in the chest under the coat goes tight and then loosens, like a held breath let out slow. You lift your eyes to the black window, to your own reflection standing in someone else's kitchen, and you say, quiet, mostly to no one:

"There you are."