Óscar Peña-Rivas

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You are Dennis Wachtel behind the register, and Dennis Wachtel is nobody's idea of a good time. Twenty-two years old, freckled, the fluorescent light doing him no favors, a line of six people stretching back past the gum rack at six-fifty on a Wednesday. Your hand — his hand — is on the scanner, beeping a rotisserie chicken, and you have been him for four minutes and that is already three minutes and forty seconds too long. The belt hums. Somebody's card gets declined and re-run. You feel the particular tiredness of a body that has stood on tile floor for six hours and will stand on it for two more, and you think: no. Not this one. Not tonight. You already know what you're doing before you finish the thought — your free hand goes to the phone in your back pocket, the one Dennis uses on break, and the line keeps moving without you really being in it anymore.

Then you are standing in sun.

Not New York light — West Texas light, flat and white and coming hard through floor-to-ceiling glass, and there is a rolling suitcase handle cold and ridged under your right palm and an earbud sitting warm in your ear feeding you the tail end of a call that has already ended. Your left hand is reaching for a laptop lid on a ledge counter, and the motion glitches — fingers close on air a half-inch short, correct, close again, exactly right this time — and then the next ten times you touch anything, you touch it like you're double-checking a bridge you've crossed ten thousand times and suddenly don't trust. Nobody around you notices. A woman with a stroller. A kid on a floor outlet. The gate monitor blinking a departure time forty minutes out.

The suitcase handle is the first door. It swings open on a hand that has pulled this same bag through this same terminal more times than either of you could count, and under that: an airport-branded tag, his initials in gold-stamped script, a gift from his wife for an anniversary he almost forgot. Carla. Her name arrives with a warmth that is not yours, settling into your chest like it belongs there, because it does. Sixteen years married. A turquoise house on a street where the wind puts dust on every windowsill by Tuesday no matter how many times you wipe it. He proposed in that house's kitchen with the swamp cooler running too loud for her to hear him the first time, had to say it twice.

The shirt is next — his shirt, this pale blue one, already on him, and touching it from the inside the way you're touching everything gives you the morning: standing in front of the bathroom mirror at five-forty, the blunt fringe of gray-silver hair combed down flat the way it's been cut since before he can remember choosing it, the same barber nine years running, a woman named Yoli who has strong opinions about bangs on a grown man and does them anyway because he asked once and never had to ask again. The clean jaw under your palm — freshly shaved, nothing catching, a two-minute ritual with a blade he's had since a work trip to Chicago — comes with the smell of the drugstore aftershave Carla buys three at a time because she likes it and won't say so directly.

The wedding band. Small stud earrings, cold, forgotten the second they went in. A gold tooth you can feel with your tongue before you ever see it in glass — it flashes when he laughs, and there is a version of him at a client dinner in Dallas, wine in hand, telling a joke that isn't that funny and watching the table laugh anyway because the room likes him, has always liked him, likes the gap where the gold shows.

Underneath all of it: forty years old, five-four, a gut that's soft from hotel bars and skipped gym memberships, shoulders that carry weight without complaint, hands that drum on laptop lids and conference tables and steering wheels without him noticing they're doing it. A body worth, on paper, more money than either of the men you've recently been will see in a lifetime combined — decades of billable hours, a portfolio Carla manages better than he lets on. Heavy pours most nights, a rosary in a drawer he touches more out of habit than belief, a church he attends twice a year and feels vaguely guilty about both times.

There's a flash of the wife's laugh on a porch at dusk. There's a flash of a deposition he nailed cold. There's a flash — smaller, quieter than the rest, not dwelt on — of something with a woman from the Phoenix office two years back that never became anything and that he has decided, permanently, never happened.

You look down. The hand on the suitcase handle is thick-fingered, tanned, a little soft at the knuckle, a plain gold band catching the window light. You turn it over once, like checking it's real.

"Better," you say, and the gold tooth shows when you do.