Ramón Achebal

The apartment smells like the beard oil Brett buys in bulk and never finishes a bottle of, and you have been him for three minutes, which is exactly long enough to remember why you don't stay in engineers. He is sitting at a desk that cost more than his car, four monitors dark except for the one with the wheel still spinning down from your last pull, and his knees ache already, and his lower back has the particular flatness of a man who sits for a living, and somewhere in his chest there's a meeting tomorrow he does not want to go to that isn't even yours to dread. Boredom, if you're honest. Not even unhappiness. Just the specific nothing of a body that has never done anything with its hands. You paid again before the ache could talk you out of it. The card reader chimes. The wheel spins. You do not decide who. You never decide who.

—

The room is not this room. There's a window with the blinds half down, gray-gold light lying across a bare mattress, no headboard, laundry on a chair. The phone is already close to a face that is not yours — six inches off, thumb frozen on a paused scroll, and you feel the weight land in you all at once, the specific gravity of a man who works outside: forearms heavier than they look, shoulders set from years of lifting, a body used, not merely occupied. Your — his — thumb starts moving again before you've caught up to it. Faster than he was going. Steadier. Past a video of somebody's grandkid, past a meme he'd have laughed at, past a text thread with a name in it you don't know yet, and the phone's light holds on a face that has stopped blinking on schedule.

The mattress creaks under a body that knows this bed by weight and springs alone. That's the first thing that comes back — not a memory yet, just an animal certainty: this side, not the other, always this side, because Marisol kicks in her sleep and claims the good side by right of twenty-two years married. The blanket under your calf is chenille, her mother's, older than the third kid.

Then the phone itself gives you something — the case is cracked at one corner from where it went into the truck bed at the Riordan place last September, and for a second you're there instead of here, dust and diesel and Hector yelling something in Spanish about the second trailer, and the crack happened and Ramón swore and everybody laughed because he never swears, and that's the whole memory, gone as fast as it came, but it leaves the warmth of being laughed at kindly.

The gray shirt against your back is thin from washing, soft in a way that isn't new-soft, it's old-soft, and it gives you a morning — not this morning, a hundred mornings folded into one — pulling it over his head in the dark of the bedroom while Marisol still slept, careful with the sleeve because his right shoulder catches sometimes from the ladder work, quiet because the baby, who isn't a baby now, used to wake at anything. The gap in his teeth whistles faintly on certain words and his kids used to mimic it and he let them, always let them, never once minded being the joke in his own house.

The tattoo on his forearm is warm under your opposite hand without you meaning to touch it — cross, praying hands, done in somebody's cousin's garage twenty years ago before he'd met Marisol, before the town knew his name, when he still thought about leaving and going somewhere with a coast. He never told the priest about the tattoo. Confessed things smaller than that. The ring on the same hand is looser than it used to be, knuckle worn down to it now, and it carries a wedding in a church with un-air-conditioned July heat and his mother crying not from sadness.

His jaw is already tight — has been tight this whole time, you realize, clenched the way it goes when he isn't paying attention to it, some low hum of worry that never fully drains out of him even lying in the dark: whether the frost holds off another week, whether the second boy's shoes still fit, whether five thousand dollars stretches to Christmas the way it did last year. Sober seventeen years and counting, and the counting itself is a kind of hand-work too, something he does instead of drinking, turning the number over like a stone in a pocket. Catholic in the unglamorous way — mass most Sundays, complaints most Mondays, a rosary in the truck's cupholder that hasn't been touched in a month and doesn't need to be to matter.

You feel all of it land at once the way his memories always do — not yours, his, borrowed heat — and under your palm the phone screen is still moving, still scrolling past a life you didn't choose to interrupt.

You stop the thumb. You turn the hand over, look at the scarred knuckles, the dirt worked so far into the creases it will never fully wash out, the tan line where the glove stops.

"There you are," you say, to no one who is listening anymore, and you don't know yet if that's true for four minutes or four years.