Marlon Etheridge

You're standing in a stranger's kitchen in El Paso, wearing a fifty-four-year-old dad bod like it's a coat you borrowed and never returned, and your back is telling you about it. Rubén Aguayo's back. Freckles under fluorescent light, a beard that itches when the swamp cooler kicks on, and a phone in your hand — his phone, if it were ever really his — open to a page with a wheel on it. You have been him less than a minute. You are already bored of him. That's the truth of it, plain and not proud: the farmhand's knees ache in a specific, tedious way, the same way every night for six hundred nights before this one, and you know without trying the whole shape of tomorrow — feed, fence line, a woman at the co-op who doesn't look at you twice. Nothing here surprises you anymore. You spin because the alternative is standing in this particular kitchen a second longer.

You pay. You spin. The wheel does not care that it's almost midnight here, that El Paso is a Thursday going soft at the edges. Somewhere it is already Friday and deep in the middle of the night and none of that matters to the wheel, only to what happens next.

The floor changes first — carpet instead of tile, cool through the sole where warmth used to be, though you don't have feet yet that know the difference. Then you have his arm, and it is already moving without you, drawing up off the mattress edge like something remembering itself. Breath goes from a ragged pull to something even and slow in the space of one exhale. Shoulders that were slack roll flat onto the bed. Hands find each other and fold on a chest that rises under them, calm, a posture this body has apparently never once chosen for itself in fifty years of sleeping, and yet here it is, arranging itself like it's been asked politely.

Streetlight comes through a gap in curtains that smell like fabric softener and, faintly, like someone else's shampoo on the other pillow.

The room gives you nothing yet. It's the bed's own warmth on one side — a shape recently vacated, gone to the bathroom or just turned away — that gives you the first flash: her elbow in your ribs some nights, her voice saying *you're doing the thing with your jaw again*, half-asleep, half-fond. Marlon Etheridge grinds his teeth when a paper's due. You didn't know that a second ago. Now it's simply true, sitting in the muscle at the hinge of his jaw, which aches faintly like it's been doing exactly that for hours.

Your hand — his hand — finds the edge of the fitted sheet where it's pulled loose from the mattress corner, an old habit of fixing it that his fingers start on before you've told them to, and that's when more comes, unbidden, in pieces: the calluses along the pads of his palm are decades old, not from books but from a line at a plant he worked twenty-two years before he ever set foot on a campus lawn, and the ache in his lower back going up the ladder of his spine isn't age exactly, it's cumulative, it's a body that spent a long time lifting things it shouldn't have and only recently started sitting instead. Fifty years old and going back to school. The pen he clicks in seminar without meaning to — you feel the phantom click in his fingers right now, an absence where the habit wants to be — belonged first to a foreman's clipboard, a tally, a life he left on purpose.

The gray in the moustache is real gray, not premature, earned in the ordinary slow way, and there's a scar through one eyebrow that flashes hot for a second — a car jack slipping in a driveway when he was nineteen, blood in his eye, his mother's hands on his face saying *hold still, hold still* — gone as fast as it comes, but it leaves the shape of her voice behind it.

His girlfriend's side of the bed still holds her weight in the mattress. Her name arrives sideways, through the smell of her on the pillow rather than any effort of yours: Denise. Two years living together in this new-build subdivision with a pickup parked crooked in the driveway because he still can't parallel a truck the way he could once back the flatbed onto a trailer blind. There's a daughter, grown, a voice on the phone on Sundays that makes this whole chest — his chest — go soft in a way nothing else does. And underneath that, quieter, an old ex-girlfriend's name that surfaces and won't quite come into focus, just a feeling like a bruise pressed from the inside: unfinished, decades cold, still there.

His backpack is somewhere by the door, green hoodie folded over the desk chair for tomorrow, and touching neither of them yet you already have the memory the shirt against his back gave you the second you arrived: this morning — his morning, hours from now by any clock that matters — pulling that hoodie over his head one sleeve at a time, sitting on the edge of this same bed, the particular strain in the shoulder as it goes overhead, forty extra pounds around the middle changing how a hoodie sits on a man who used to be lean. Jeans worn soft at the knee from sitting cross-legged on a lawn that's too green for this state's second half of the year, staring at a laptop that still intimidates him a little, in the middle of people young enough to be that daughter's friends.

He isn't ashamed of any of it. That surprises you, coming through him — no shame, just a low, steady stubbornness, church-taught, patient. *You get there when you get there.*

You lie still in his folded hands a moment longer, feeling how right they've decided to be, how his body has apparently chosen, in your absence, the one sleeping posture it never uses. Then your eyes open in the dark.

You lift the near hand off your chest and turn it over above your face, streetlight catching the pale ridge of an old scar you didn't earn crossing an eyebrow you didn't grow, calluses gone soft at the heel of the palm you didn't build.

"There he is," you say, quiet, to no one in the room, and you don't yet know if you mean him or you.