Ray Fasano

HIS LAST NAME IS Fasano. HOOK: You spun again to see the man you used to be — from someone else's kitchen.

Gerald Muskie's knees ache standing at the counter, and you have had two minutes to notice that they ache all the time, that he is forty-nine and his hands have gone soft in a way that has nothing to do with the refrigerant lines he has snaked through half of Philadelphia. There's a beauty mark near his jaw you keep catching in the toaster's chrome. It is a Tuesday afternoon and he has nowhere he has to be, and that is the whole problem: two minutes ago you took this body between service calls, and already the shape of him bores you, the gray hair, the ordinary blue eyes, the good-enough life stacked up neat as folded laundry. You did not spin for him. You spun because you know exactly what waits on the other end of it, one specific man, and today you let yourself go get him.

The stirring stops mid-circle and starts again the other way.

You are shorter than you were, and heavier through the middle in that soft, unworked way, standing over a pan that smells like garlic and browning meat, wooden spoon warm in a hand with a tremor you can feel now that you're paying attention, a fine electric shiver just under the knuckles. Fluorescent light off cheap linoleum. A radio murmuring in another room. You salt the pan without tasting it, and your other hand — his hand — is already reaching into the cabinet for a second plate before you've decided to.

The flannel shirt is what opens first, cuff against your forearm, and it comes back sleeve by sleeve: this morning, sitting on the edge of the bed with his back complaining the way it always does now, some old injury from a fall in a stope years ago that never set right, threading his arm through and thinking, not for the first time, that Marcus would be up before him if there was coffee to be made. Marcus. The name arrives whole, warm, a weight beside him in the bed that isn't there right now because Marcus works the earlier shift downtown. The shirt remembers being pulled on slow, one button at a time, hands that shake worse in the morning before the first cigarette settles them.

The spoon in your hand brings the mine. Not a memory so much as a decade of them stacked into the wood grain of the handle — cage doors, the smell of diesel and rock dust, the particular ache that lives in his shoulders by hour six, the younger guys who don't call him Ray so much as "old man" with something like fondness in it. He is good at this. His hands, whatever they do when he's not watching them, know exactly how to check a line, set a charge, read a wall that's about to let go. There's pride folded into the tremor, not shame — a body that has done real work and is still standing.

The counter under your hip, worn smooth in one spot from years of leaning here waiting for water to boil, gives you the kitchen itself: Sunday mornings, an argument about paint colors that never got resolved, the bungalow's porch out front where he sits some evenings with a cigarette watching the mountains go from gold to gray, not for any reason, just because the shape of them is his now, has been for twenty years.

And under that, quieter, something the shirt doesn't want to give up easy — a different porch, a different state, red hair and a laugh that used to make him feel like the only person in a room. Denny. His brother, the tattoo artist out in the high desert, the two of them sharing a last name and not much else since their mother's funeral, a silence that isn't a fight so much as two men who never learned how to call each other without a reason. You know that silence from the inside too, though you're not supposed to remember it as him — you wore Denny once, a day and an hour, not long ago, and left him only just now, which is a thing this body could never guess at and which sits in you like a private joke with no one to tell it to.

There's an ex in here too, threaded through an old jacket he still hasn't gotten rid of, hanging by the door in the other photograph of this life — a name that comes with a wince, unfinished business gone soft with time, not gone.

The second plate is already down on the counter, beside the first, the way his hands set it there before he caught up to why.

You look at your hands — the tremor, the calluses gone thick along the base of each finger, the crooked line where his nose was broken once and never quite reset, though that's not something a hand shows you, that's just there when you glance toward the window's reflection over the sink. You turn the spoon over once like you're checking it's real.

"Didn't miss you," you say, to no one, to the stove, and you're not sure yet if you mean him or the last one or the one still waiting its turn on a screen somewhere in Philadelphia, cooling.