Michael Summerfield

The strap is still on your shoulder when you decide. Marco Villalpando's shoulder, technically — that beauty mark on the cheekbone, that easy compact frame that fits under a condenser coil like it was built for the work. Six hours and eight minutes of him, and it was fine, it was even good for a while, the smell of refrigerant and the radio in Spanish and a text from a woman named Reyna that made the corners of his mouth do something without you asking them to. But it is eleven in the morning here and you are standing in his kitchen looking at his own reflection in a dead microwave door, and the trouble is simple: it is not yours. None of it accumulates to you. You did not earn the ease in that face. You are a tenant paying no rent, and a tenant gets restless. You open the laptop on his counter, and there is the wheel, waiting the way it always waits, patient as a doorman.

You do not decide much beyond *again*. You never do. Your thumb — his thumb — taps spin, and the color drains out of the room the way it always does, and —

The gym rack is close enough to touch. Your hands are wider on the bar than they should be, two inches wider than this arm has gone all year, and the weight of it is already sliding down into your shoulders like it has been there the whole set. Breath goes out through teeth that are not doing what they were doing a second ago. There is a sweating water bottle by a bench that is no longer where your feet are, and fluorescent light instead of the gray of the LA morning, and a burn starting low in the forearms that belongs to someone with more mileage on him than Marco had.

The bar comes back down to the rack with a sound that isn't loud, just final, metal finding metal. And the shirt on your back — soaked through at the spine, black cotton gone thin from a hundred washes — gives you the first of it before you've even let go of the bar: an early morning, dark still outside a Bushwick window, this same shirt pulled on inside out and corrected with the particular annoyance of forty-eight-year-old shoulders that don't move the way they used to first thing. Sarah laughing from the bed, half-asleep, saying he always does that, every single morning, and him saying give me a break, I'm barely awake, and it not being an argument, just a marriage, seventeen years of small proof that somebody is watching you be a fool in the dark and loves you for it anyway.

The name comes with the shirt's sleeve as your eyes drop to the arm — SUMMERFIELD, in the tag ironed inside the collar from some long-ago summer camp packing list, and under it, on the skin itself, the script does the rest of the work: Sarah & Michael, 14.10.2011, the date wrapping the forearm like the wedding band on the left hand was too small a place to put seventeen years. You feel the tattoo needle in memory-flash, the buzzing hangover of pain from a shop in Greenpoint, Sarah's hand gripping his other one the whole time though she wasn't even the one getting it, saying stop being a baby, and both of them laughing at the artist's face.

The bench under you gives up its own year: this same rack, six mornings a week, the shoulder that clicks now on the overhead press since the incident with the china cabinet — four flights, no elevator, a client who tipped nothing and complained about scuff marks the whole way down. Migraines starting behind the left eye on the bad days, always the same eye, a white pill dry-swallowed in the truck cab before a job because water meant a bathroom break and bathroom breaks meant falling behind. A pack of cigarettes in the truck's cupholder that he keeps meaning to switch to the mornings only and never does. Two kids — a boy's height marked in pencil on a doorframe he refinished himself, a girl's soccer cleats drying on the stoop last week because Sarah wouldn't let them in the house wet. None of it dramatic. All of it his, worn in the specific way a life gets worn when nobody's watching it from outside.

The water bottle sweats against your foot, forgotten, and under your palms the barbell knurling is exactly as rough as it should be to a man who has gripped it six mornings a week for years, calluses answering calluses. Your knuckles ache to crack themselves without being told to. The body is heavier than Marco's, older through the knees, stronger through the back — a mover's strength, built by other people's furniture and not by any gym, though the gym is where the seams get maintained.

You sit up off the bench and look down, and it's a stranger's hands, wide-knuckled, one still smudged from a hallway railing on Saturday's job, the ring catching the fluorescent light.

You turn them over once, both sides, like checking a delivery for damage.

"There you are," you say to no one, out loud, into the empty gym, and you don't yet know if that's six hours or six months, and you don't ask.