Ramón Iwata

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Colt Massingale's hands are shaking on the phone, and they're not even your hands, not really — you've only had them fourteen minutes, blond arm hair catching the light from a gas station's overhang, and already you're bored of them. Skinny wrists. A sales rep's soft palms that have never held a level. You spun for Colt because the wheel doesn't let you choose, and you kept him this long out of something like manners, the way you finish a drink you didn't order. But fourteen minutes ago you were a pharmacist named Todd in Honolulu for three minutes only, standing in his kitchen with his good knives, and something about leaving him so fast has been itching at you since, an unscratched place, and you know exactly what you want now, and it isn't Colt's freckles or his commission checks. You want to go back toward that itch, not into it — you want the man Todd wanted, the reason Todd was worth wearing at all for those three minutes, the man that pharmacist used to look up during his lunch break, older, calloused, unavailable. You open the site on Colt's phone with Colt's thumb. You pay. You spin.

The kitchen isn't yours — it was never Colt's either, obviously, and now it isn't Colt at all: your weight drops four inches and thickens through the middle, and there's a mug already in your hand, warm, and a wedding band pressing cold against a finger that wasn't wearing one a half-second ago. The light is low gold through a window over a sink you don't recognize, coats on hooks, a stainless dog bowl catching the glare by the door. Your knees ache in a way Colt's never did. You set the mug down without deciding to, and it lands inside a ring already worn pale into the counter's finish, like it's done this a thousand times without you.

The vest is the first thing that talks. Reflective tape gone dull with handling, canvas gone soft as chamois at the seams, and it comes back not as a memory but as weight — the particular drag of a full pouch riding your left hip, and under it a whole year of jobsites, framing a bump-out on a house in Salyersville with two guys half your age who call you Ray without asking if that's short for anything, because it isn't, because your name is Ramón and out here that gets sanded down to something easier for other mouths, and you let it, the way you let a lot of things get sanded down. Your back tells you what forty years of ladders costs — a low ache along the L4 that has its own weather, that flares when rain's coming before the sky knows it. Your hands know a hammer's balance the way a tongue knows a filling; the muscle answers before the thought arrives.

The flannel shirt is next, sleeve by sleeve, and it gives you a morning: standing in a bedroom that is entirely, aggressively yours — your dead wife's reading glasses still on the nightstand eleven months on, because you cannot yet be the man who moves them — pulling this shirt off a hanger because it was hers to iron once and you like that thought better than you like most thoughts before seven a.m. Rosa. Her name arrives with the button placket, unbidden, the whole shape of a marriage that was ordinary and good and then over, cancer taking eighteen months out of both of you like a toll. There is a daughter somewhere in a photo on a dresser you're not standing near right now, and there is a woman before Rosa, younger, a name that still makes something in your chest tilt sideways when jeans that used to be hers — no, not hers, you correct, just a pair like ones she wore — hang on a line at a job site and the wind moves them. She is the one who got away, and you understand, wearing him, that he has never once let himself resent her for it.

The nose ring, the studs in both ears — these came from nowhere anyone in this county expected, a small private rebellion decades old that nobody bothers commenting on anymore, and holding them in your face now feels like holding a decision he made once and never unmade.

This house around you isn't his. Whose it is comes in sideways, through the third drawer your hand finds a spoon in without looking — a client's house, empty for the day, you're only meant to be checking a water stain in the hallway ceiling, and you helped yourself to coffee because the owners told you to, weeks ago, and never rescinded it. A dog bowl with no dog in it right now. The lights are already off down the hall and your body walks toward them anyway, turning them on ahead of itself out of some old habit of not trusting a house you don't own to light itself.

Where he is, it's the deep quiet part of a Monday, work stopped early for a delivery that didn't come, and where you left Colt it was the used-up middle of the same afternoon — close enough that the day doesn't argue with itself, just tilts.

You look down. The hands are wrong in the good way — older, a nick healed white across one knuckle, a wedding band worn thin on the left one, dirt worked so far into the lines of the right that no amount of washing has ever gotten it all. You turn the right one over, palm up, like you're checking for something that isn't there anymore.

"Rosa," you say out loud, to the empty kitchen, in his voice, and you don't know yet if that was him or you, and you don't much care, and you have no idea how long you get to not care before the wheel calls you back to itself.