Peter Vaskovich

You're standing in someone else's kitchen at 2 a.m. with a pipe wrench you don't remember picking up, and the kid's arm is aching already — eighteen years old and it aches — some water heater in Houston he crawled under three hours ago, and the boredom of it comes up through his shoulder like a second ache. You spun this one four minutes ago. Four minutes of freckles and a jaw that hasn't finished being a face yet, and already the wanting is back, ugly and familiar, because a body this new should not feel this used up. Somewhere down the hall a dog you don't know barks once. You set the wrench on the counter, open the laptop that isn't yours, and go back to the site the boy bookmarked without knowing he'd bookmarked it for you.

Then you are leaning against a counter with a phone in your hand and a lamp burning oil somewhere to your left, and the last three fingers of your right hand won't fully open, an old ache set into the knuckle like weather. The screen under your thumb says a number with too many zeros in it. Your thumb is already lifting off the glass. You did not lift it. The phone goes face-down on the counter on its own and the hand that put it there just — stays. Doesn't reach back for it. Somewhere behind your sternum a whole life is waiting to happen to you sideways, through your own skin.

The shirt is what starts it — gray cotton, soft in the way a shirt goes soft only after it has been washed by the same machine for a decade, and it gives you a morning: him standing in a bedroom with weak gray window-light, wife still under the blanket, pulling this exact shirt over his head one-armed because the other shoulder was barking at him, the ache that lives permanently in the left side of his back from sixteen years of stairs and dressers and other people's pianos. He'd rolled the shoulder twice, grimaced, decided against the ibuprofen because he'd already taken two that week and didn't want to make a habit the doctor would ask about. He'd looked at the tattoo on his inner forearm without meaning to — Elena, 04.12.16 — and felt the small, ordinary jolt of it, the one that isn't grief and isn't anything he'd call by name, just a date that means his daughter arrived on it. His son's name isn't on his arm and he has never worked out why that bothers him a little, some years, and other years not at all.

The cargo pants against your legs bring the smell of a truck bed, sawdust and furniture blankets and the particular stink of a walk-up on Fourth Avenue with no elevator and a customer who tipped in cash because she felt bad watching a man his age carry her mother's china cabinet down four flights alone. Your knees know those stairs. Your knees are forty-one years old and they know exactly how many stairs are in that building without being told.

The counter under your palm brings the kitchen itself — the dishes stacked because the dishwasher's broken and he keeps saying he'll fix it, the toaster oven that was a wedding gift eleven years back, a marriage that is good in the unglamorous way of two tired people who still reach for each other's feet under the blanket without discussing it. There was a girl before her — Casey, red-haired, gone fifteen years and still surfacing sometimes at 2 a.m. exactly like this, not because he wants her back but because being twenty-five once felt like something and he isn't sure when it stopped. He has never told his wife how often he thinks of her. It isn't much. It's enough that it's his.

The ring on your left hand is warm from his skin, plain, a little tight over the knuckle the way it gets when he's been lifting all day and his hands swell. Under it, always, the two kids sleeping upstairs — the boy who wants sneakers Peter can't justify, the daughter whose name is inked into his arm because she came four weeks early and he'd been so frightened he needed it written somewhere permanent that she'd made it. $61,000 in an account he checks more than he tells anyone, not enough, never quite enough, which is why his thumb was on that phone screen in the first place, dragging past a watch that costs more than his truck payment, hating himself a little for wanting it anyway.

You feel all forty-one years of him now, settled into the shoulders — the low, constant static of the joint pain, the give in the lower back that means mornings start slow, the strength still in the forearms that comes from a job that never once let him get soft anywhere but the middle. Skinny fat, the trainer at some long-abandoned gym membership called it once, and Peter had laughed and never gone back.

You turn your hand over on the counter, palm up, like it might have an answer written on it. It doesn't. It has calluses and a wedding band and a life going on upstairs that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with him.

"Okay," you say, to no one, to the dark kitchen, to the lamp burning its little flame. "Okay."