Marty Feingold

You are Ruben Salcedo for less than a minute — sixty-four years old, bald head catching the office fluorescents, freckled forearms resting on a desk covered in listings you stopped reading twenty spins ago. You spin because the numbers on Ruben's monitor are the same numbers they were yesterday, and because being a sales rep in Houston at eleven in the morning on a Monday, with the AC rattling and a coworker asking if you want in on a lunch order, has the particular flatness of a life that fits fine and interests you not at all. Ruben's hands click the mouse. Somewhere in your six hundred and thirty-one other men there was a fisherman, a boxer, a priest once, for four days. You want the itch scratched again. You pay. You spin.

You are crouched. Your knees announce themselves first — fifty-three years of them, a low ache behind both caps that has nothing to do with the concrete floor. A sock hangs from your fingers, damp-warm, and a fluorescent tube overhead hums at a pitch that needles the base of your skull. The dryer door yawns open in front of you, half a load of dark laundry catching light. Somewhere upstairs a house exists that you have not seen yet.

The sock is a door. Through it: a boy's foot, years ago, small in your palm, you kneeling to put a shoe on him in a hallway that smelled like coffee and cut grass — Sam, four years old, refusing the left shoe on principle. That's your son. Twenty-two now, in Providence, doesn't call enough, and the not-calling-enough sits in your chest like something swallowed wrong, familiar, permanent, almost comfortable in how long you've carried it.

You stand. Your back objects — a management-grade twinge just above the belt line, the kind you've learned to unlock with a slow roll of the hips, the kind a body remembers how to do without asking permission. Your t-shirt is soft from a hundred washes, blue going gray at the collar, and touching it gives you a bathroom mirror at six-forty this morning: you pulling it over your head one-armed because the other hand was already reaching for the insulin kit on the counter, an old habit, precise, no drama in it anymore. Khakis next — you remember buttoning them a notch looser than you used to, an accommodation you made without comment, the way you make most accommodations now.

The basket at your feet is Diane's basket, and it is not the first thing you touch that tells you about her — it's the smell of the dryer sheets, waxy and floral, and under it a whole two years: her laugh from the kitchen upstairs right now, muffled through joists, her voice saying your name the way she says it when she's teasing you about something, the mail she leaves on the counter, the side of the bed that is hers now and has been since you sold the house you used to share with someone else. That someone else arrives too, uninvited, through nothing you're holding — Carol, seven years gone as your wife, still texting you about Sam's birthday, still in your phone under her first name only, a friendship you didn't expect to survive the divorce and did. You feel no grief reaching for her name. Just weather. Old weather, passed through.

Your hands know things your mind hasn't asked them to remember: how to fold a fitted sheet into a square nobody else in the house can manage, how a lockbox combination feels before you consciously recall the numbers, how to click a pen four times in a row while a buyer decides whether they love a kitchen. You feel that click-urge now, empty-handed, a phantom motion in your right thumb. Diabetes lives in you as a low hum you've stopped hearing, the way you've stopped hearing the dryer's buzzer the instant it goes off — you're already moving before the sound finishes.

You pull the load out warm. It exhales heat against your forearms, and folding takes over your hands before you've decided to fold — corners squared, sleeves crossed flat, a stack rising precise and small in the basket, nothing like the crumpled shirts waiting in some drawer you haven't climbed to yet. It feels like relief. It feels like the one part of the day that goes exactly the way it's supposed to.

You look down at your hands doing it — creased, sun-spotted at the knuckles, a plain wedding-adjacent tan line from a ring you don't wear anymore — and you stop moving.

You lift your eyes off them into the low basement light.

"Diane," you say, not loud, just enough to carry up the stairs, "you home?"