Marcus Ibeh

The office has gone amber with late light, and Peter Salvaggio's law degree throws a long rectangle of shadow across a desk you did not build and do not care about. Forty years old, decent shoulders going soft, a Monday ending the way all his Mondays end — a client's email still open, unanswered, the cursor blinking in a paragraph about a lien. You have been him less than a minute of his own reckoning and you already know the whole shape of the rest of tonight: a frozen dinner, a rerun, the particular quiet of a house that was built for two people who no longer live in it. There is nothing wrong with him. That is the trouble. Forty is a number that sits on you like a coat you didn't choose, and you spun the wheel two hundred and nine times to stop feeling exactly this — the settling, the knowing what happens next. You open the laptop, not to work. You open a new tab out of habit older than this body. vessel.cards loads the way it always loads, patient, gray, a wheel rendered in clean vector lines like it has never hurt anyone. You do not decide so much as arrive at the click already having decided. You pay. You spin.

—

The strip light is the first thing, too white, humming at a frequency that lives behind your teeth. Then the weight of him: shorter than Peter by a handful of inches, tighter through the shoulders, twenty-four years old in every joint — knees that stop bouncing exactly when yours arrive, because the board on the wall clicks from 47 to 48 in the same half-second you land. A paper cup sweats against his — your — fingers. You set it down. Square, though you didn't mean square, some old habit of his hands doing it before you've caught up. You fold his hands in his lap. Somebody calls a name from a doorway down the hall and you don't look up, because he wasn't going to either, and for one full second there is no you and no him, just a body deciding not to move.

—

The jeans first — worn soft at the knee, and with them: a Sunday two years back, kneeling on turquoise-painted concrete steps scraping gum off with a putty knife because a nephew visiting from Fabens had stepped in it barefoot, and Marcus laughing so hard he'd had to sit down on the step, the heat coming up off it through the denim. The gray t-shirt against your back gives you more: this morning, early, him pulling it over his head in a bedroom with a box fan going because the swamp cooler's been dying for a month and he keeps saying he'll fix it, keeps not fixing it. Brown eyes checked in a mirror clouded at the edges. A hand — his hand, this hand — going up unthinking to touch along his hairline, the M pushed back at both temples, a habit worn so deep he does it now, in the chair, without knowing, fingertips finding the retreat of it like checking a bruise that never quite heals or worsens, just sits there being twenty-four and already thinning.

The boots are steel-toed underneath you, scuffed pale at the left one where a pallet jack caught him in the stockroom eight months ago — not his job anymore, he'd been promoted up out of the stockroom, but his feet remember the boots' second life as inventory shoes before he had the title, before he had the little glass office with the door he keeps propped open because he likes to hear the floor, likes being findable. Mid-level manager. Not the top of anything. Enough to make rent on a flat turquoise house with chain-link out front that his mother helped him put a down payment on, dust always finding its way onto every windowsill no matter the season, white desert light coming through even in December like it forgets to be gentle.

The waiting room smell arrives last and largest — antiseptic over old carpet, and with it the reason: a physical for a promotion that hasn't happened yet, a form in a folder three feet from your hand, a phone in his pocket he has already checked four times for a call from a woman he went on two dates with in the spring and has not stopped thinking about since, though neither of them has said anything worth repeating. No ex who matters. No one waiting at the house except the dust and a coffee maker he bought used. A cigarette he didn't have this morning, three days into quitting, the paper cup of water down here specifically because his mouth won't stop wanting something to hold. Sundays with his mother's cooking, spiritual in the loose unbothered way of a man who prays sometimes and means it and doesn't call it anything. Scraping by, and knowing it, and not especially minding, because he is twenty-four and assumes there is more of everything coming — more money, more hair maybe, more of the woman from the spring — the particular optimism of someone who has not yet been told no by anything that mattered.

—

You look at your hands — his hands, unlined, calloused at the pads from a life of gripping things, a boxcutter, a clipboard, his own jaw in the mirror each morning — and you turn them over slow, the way the wheel has taught you to, checking a stranger's knuckles for what they know how to do. Down the hall a nurse says his name again, twice now, patient the way people get with men who don't answer.

You lift your eyes off your palm and into whatever is watching, and you say, quiet, mostly to yourself:

"Forty-eight."