Marlon Etheridge

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The apartment smells like fixer and old coffee, and Victor Amenta's knees ache the way they have for three years now, a dull crosswise pain that has nothing to do with anything Victor did and everything to do with a body that is sixty-five and has always been sixty-five, as far as you're concerned, because you only moved into it last night. His nose, broken once and reset wrong, whistles faintly when he breathes through it. You are standing in his dark bathroom in his robe, having just looked at his own face in the mirror for the four hundred and eighty-sixth time this month feeling like a man checking a rental car for damage. Not his damage. Yours, now, and boring already. The Miami evening outside the window is doing its violet, humid thing, and somewhere in this apartment there is a laptop with a browser tab that never fully closes, vessel.cards sitting behind three other windows like a drawer you keep not shutting all the way. You open it because Victor's hands are already old and you are not going to spend whatever is left of this rental getting older inside them. That's the whole reason, if you're honest, which you are not required to be. You pay. You spin.

The leash goes slack in your hand mid-thought, and the thought isn't yours — it's the tail end of somebody wondering if the dog found something worth the two extra minutes — and then it's gone and it's just you, standing over a Yorkie with its nose buried in a hedge, in a heat that hits like a held breath, light low and orange and murderous off a row of stucco walls behind you. Your knees don't hurt. Nothing hurts. There's a tightness in the shoulders that isn't pain, it's just muscle, a lot of it, recently used. The dog looks up at you, ears back, reading something in your stillness before you do. Your hand — this hand, dark-knuckled, a thin white scar across one first knuckle that isn't yours to remember yet — winds the leash twice without being told to, and you start walking before you've decided to, because the body already knows how, and the dog has to trot to catch the new rhythm of it.

The shirt is what opens first. Navy cotton, worn soft, and under it the memory comes up like something surfacing in water: a chest tattoo, a face done in black and gray realism, and the flash is not the ink but the chair — the buzz of it, four sessions, a friend's hand steadying his shoulder, and underneath that, further down, a funeral in July heat with the AC broken in the church and a woman two pews back fanning herself with a program that had this same face printed smaller, in color, smiling. His father. Gone nine years now. Marlon had the portrait done the winter after, from the one photo where the old man wasn't squinting, and he still can't look at his own chest in a mirror without the two-second gut-drop of grief arriving before the pride does, every single time, like his body forgets the order they're supposed to come in.

The pants are next, and they're easier — cotton chinos, olive, worn thin at one thigh where his phone rides, and the memory there is smaller and more recent: this morning, or what was this morning to him, pulling them on standing on one leg in a bedroom with good light and bad blinds, hopping once to catch balance, laughing once at himself for it, alone, the particular privacy of a big house with nobody else living in it. Forty-four and unmarried and he has stopped explaining that to people at dinners. There was a woman two years ago who wanted the whole thing — house, name, the second half of a life — and he wanted the version of it where he still had all his Fridays to himself, and there was no fight about it, just a slow cooling, like coffee left on a counter, and he still thinks of her sometimes with something that isn't quite regret.

The shoes are the practice — actual practice, hours of it, footwork drilled so deep it lives below thought, and under your feet now on the sidewalk it surfaces as a phantom itch to cut left, to plant and go, muscle memory with nowhere to spend itself on a residential block at dog-walking pace. The body is thick through the shoulders and forearms in a way that isn't for show; it's for Sundays, for getting hit and getting back up, for a career with an actuarial table all its own that he does not think about on purpose. Gray is coming in at his temples under the dye job, and there's a discipline in that too — the biweekly touch-up, a barber named Reg who's cut his hair fourteen years and knows better than to comment on the roots. Between his back teeth, a phantom shape: a toothpick he isn't holding right now, and the want for one anyway, small and constant as a tic.

There is money in this life, the unhurried kind — a financial guy who calls twice a year, a house with a pool nobody swims in enough — and there is a stillness to the man that has nothing to do with any of that. Nothing dramatic in him. No wound the story wants to press on. Just a Friday evening, a dog he's had four years, a street he's walked a thousand times, gravel yard out back with saguaros throwing long blue shadows in light that's about to go from orange to nothing.

You look down at your hand on the leash — his hand, the scarred knuckle, skin a shade you've never worn before — and turn it over slow, watching it not be Victor's.

"Good boy," you say, out loud, to a dog that isn't listening, in a voice that surprises you by being warm.