Neil Kowalik

Rogelio Nava's knees ache on the porch steps in the two o'clock light, and that is the whole problem with him right now: the knees, the porch, the same client's gravel driveway waiting across town with the same drainage complaint he's heard four times this month. Forty-eight years in this body and less than a minute of it yours, and already you know its weather — the low dull throb behind the left kneecap, the way the shoulders want to round forward like they're still bent over a trencher. It is a good enough body. It is not the reason you came back to the site with your thumb already moving.

The reason is smaller than that and uglier: you are bored of gravel. Bored of a man who has done one honest thing his whole life and done it well and has nothing else in him you want to wear a second longer. Forty-five men taught you that boredom arrives faster than shame does. You open the laptop balanced on your — his — knee, the porch cold coming up through the wood, and you find vessel.cards already waiting in the browser history like it always does, and you pay, and you spin, not for a reason you'd say out loud, just the itch, just because the wheel is there and Rogelio Nava is not, and never wanted anything you haven't already used up.

The wheel turns. Somewhere a hardware store's fluorescent light is doing what fluorescent light does at the end of a Friday, and you are standing under it before the spinner on the screen even finishes slowing down.

The clipboard is already in your left hand. Your right hand is holding a pen an inch above a line that says QTY, and the pen stops there, hovering, because the hand that was about to write "24" is now yours and you don't know yet what the number should be. One motion done wrong — the pen dips too far, nearly touches the paper before the count is even confirmed — then you correct, slow, deliberate, checking the bin of 3/8-inch lag bolts like you have never counted anything in your life. The ten counts after that come out careful in a way this body has not needed to be careful in years. Muscle does the counting. You are only riding behind it, learning the weight of him: five-nine, denser through the chest and forearms than Rogelio ever was, no ache in the knees at all, a body that has been on its feet for eleven hours and doesn't yet feel it.

The apron ties cross at your back, stiff with old paint, and touching them gives you the first flash — not a whole scene, just his hands crossing them behind himself in a mirror he doesn't own anymore, some earlier version of this same knot tied nine thousand mornings running. Then it's gone and you're back in the store, tools hanging in their outlines on the pegboard like a shadow of themselves, the roll-up gate behind you still down at the alley side, streetlight starting to pool sodium-orange through the front glass because outside it is evening already, the day emptying out of the sky while your last body's afternoon was only getting started.

You touch the clipboard's cold metal clip and get more: a name, Kowalik Hardware, hand-lettered gold on the window twenty-two years running, his father's hand actually, not his, the shop older than he is. You touch the flannel at your own collar and get the morning — his girlfriend Denise's voice from the kitchen, the coffee maker ticking, two kids' backpacks already gone out the door to the bus, him buttoning this shirt one-handed while checking his phone for a supplier's callback, sleeve rolled twice because it's always been a half-inch too long since he bought it. The bun at the back of his neck — you feel your own fingers twitch toward it and remember, faint, a barber four blocks over, Denise's hands doing it better on the mornings she has time. The earring, the small silver hoop, cool under a fingertip when you touch your own lobe without deciding to: a gift, some birthday, worn every day since without a single thought given to why.

You feel how strong this body is without asking it to be — the shoulders that lift paint cans two at a time, the forearms that know a hundred different grips before the mind names any of them. You feel what it costs him too: the tremor that isn't there yet today but is there some mornings, first thing, before the first drink he tells himself he isn't going to have and has by ten. Denise doesn't say anything about it anymore. The kids don't know, or pretend not to. It sits in him low and constant, a debt that never gets called, and today — this exact Friday evening, closing time — it hasn't started yet, and won't, because there is no tomorrow morning coming for him now.

Your hand, without you sending it there, drifts up and touches your own jaw — smooth, freshly shaved, a reflex this body has that has nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with forty years of not knowing where else to put a free hand. You let it happen. It feels like him doing it, not you.

You look down at the clipboard, at the pen, at the hand holding both — solid, tanned at the wrist where the sleeve stops, a life's worth of small white nicks across the knuckles that the light catches one at a time. You turn it over once, like checking it's real. Then you lift your eyes to the front window, to your own reflection ghosted over the darkening street outside, and you say, to no one, in a voice that isn't cracked yet the way it will be in a few years if this life is allowed to run its course —

"Twenty-four's short again."

Behind the words there's already the wheel, waiting on some other screen in some other city, patient, and no clock anywhere telling you when you'll reach for it.