Max Tillery

You are standing in a rented house outside Winchester, and the drywall smells like somebody else's paint. The contractor's hands — square, callused, a white scar across the left thumb from a nail gun in some spring you did not live through — hang loose at his sides while the television plays low in the next room. You have had this one four months. He was fine. He was more than fine, actually, he had a truck that started every time and a dog that liked you by the second week, and that should have been enough to make you stay a good long while.

But this evening, sitting on his own couch in his own skin, you caught yourself thinking about the shape of the wheel and not the shape of the dog. That is the tell, after twenty spins. Not misery. Just a kind of itch behind the sternum, a hunger with no object, the particular boredom of a man who has been given a whole life and finds himself checking the time. You do not examine it too closely. You never do. You get up, you find the site on the contractor's phone with his own thumbprint, and you spin.

The wheel turns and there is no interval, no falling, no dark — there is only the fact that your hand, which was resting against a doorframe in Kentucky a half-second ago, is now flat against your own chest, and the chest is not the one you had.

You are half-dressed at the foot of a bed in Kansas. The shirt is open, buttoned crooked — third button into the wrong hole — and a tie hangs loose and unknotted around a collar that smells like fabric softener and, underneath that, like motor oil that never quite washes out. Evening light comes low and yellow through a window with the blinds half-down, laid across a lamp that's already on though it isn't dark yet. The room is a mess of clothes on the floor, like somebody got dressed and undressed twice trying to find the right thing. Your fingers — his fingers, freckled across the backs, a fine-line geometric tattoo running the inside of the left forearm — find the mis-set button on their own, undo it, and set the whole placket right without you telling them to. The tie goes up next, into a knot your hands have never tied in this life, four-in-hand instead of whatever this man usually does, and something in the shoulders resists it for a second like muscle disagreeing with itself.

That's when it comes. Not all at once — through the shirt first, worn soft at the elbows, and it brings a whole morning with it: standing in this exact spot two years ago pulling this same shirt off a hanger, late for a shift because the ex, Carrie, had come by the night before to get the last of her boxes and stayed till 1 a.m. arguing about nothing that mattered anymore, and he'd let her stay because some nights the quiet after her leaving the first time had been worse than any fight. The shirt remembers the garage more than it remembers her, though — a name patch that used to say something else before he took the job at Vance's two-bay off Route 4, the smell of it never coming out no matter how many times it goes through the wash, degreaser and rubber and the particular cold of a concrete floor coming up through a rolling creeper at 7 a.m.

The tattoos on the forearm give up their own small flash — a shop in Salina, nineteen years old, a friend now three states away, the two of them laughing about geometry homework while the needle ran, the shapes meaning nothing then and less now, just his.

Your feet remember the floor of the garage before they remember this carpet — how many mornings he's stood exactly like this, half in his clothes, thinking about the thunderheads that stack up over the wheat stubble by six most evenings this time of year, black and swollen and never quite breaking. Blood pressure medication in the bathroom cabinet down the hall, the doctor's voice saying watch the salt, son, at twenty-eight like it was already a warning bell. Mass on Sundays when he makes it, which isn't every week, guilt about that sitting exactly where the guilt about Carrie sits, low and familiar and never quite acted on. A big night out with the guys from the shop once or twice a month, and otherwise nothing, no smoke, no need for it.

The body under your hands is good — lean through the shoulders, strong through the forearms in the particular way of a man who's spent a decade with his hands inside engines, a dull permanent ache low in the back from bending under raised cars, knuckles that know a wrench without looking for it. Freckles catch the lamp light across the nose when you finally lift your head to the window and see your own reflection ghosted over the glass, platinum hair falling wrong over unfamiliar brows.

You look down. You turn the hand over, freckled knuckles, oil worked so deep into one thumbnail it will never come all the way out, and for a second it is the most interesting thing you have ever seen.

"There you are," you say, to no one who is listening anymore, and the thunderhead outside goes on stacking itself black against the last of the yellow light.