Raymond Sobczak

Nine minutes ago you called this a good one — Walter's shoulders, Walter's shop-callused palms, a burn scar you'd already stopped noticing. You're standing at his own workbench mid-shift, fluorescent Detroit noon coming flat through the high windows, and the wanting comes back anyway, the way it always does, a starved little itch under the ribs that has nothing to do with what Walter has. Nine minutes and already you're bored inside him — bored of the tremor-free hands, the ache-free knees, the whole unremarkable good health of him. You want the itch scratched. You reach into your pocket, not his, thumb the phone that traveled with you across twenty-eight men, and pull up vessel.cards, and the wheel is already spinning before Walter's next thought would have arrived.

The board clicks to 48.

And you are sitting down — already sitting, already heavy, hips wide in a hard bench seat, a paper cup sweating lukewarm water against your palm. The knee under your right hand stops its bounce on the same click the numbers turn. Somewhere a woman's voice reads a name into the room and you do not look up. You are staring at the number board like it owes you an explanation, and it does not have one, and neither do you, not yet.

The shirt is the first thing. Cotton, checked, buttons done up over a T-shirt that used to fit better — and touching it, your own forearm brushing your own side, gives you the closet, gray light through miniblinds, a hand — his hand — working the buttons slow because the fingers won't hurry anymore, not since the numbers started running high a few years back. Ruthanne's voice from the hallway, not urgent, just a habit of decades: You want eggs or you want to just get there. Raymond's voice back, gravel-soft: Get there. The appointment is a follow-up, blood work, the endocrinologist's office that always runs forty minutes behind no matter what the little board promises. He picked this shirt because it was already on the chair. He did not think about it being the last thing he'd ever choose.

The cup in the hand: it isn't his, exactly, but the paper against the pads of the fingers pulls something older — a thermos, decades back, coffee on a loading dock at four in the morning, cold air, cigarettes other men smoked that he never once wanted, not once in sixty-four years, and a small private pride in that, tucked away like a coin. The pride sits next to another feeling entirely: church basement, folding chairs, a hand — his — raised early and often, a faith worn plain and unadvertised, the kind that doesn't need saying out loud in a waiting room with a stranger three seats down.

The ring is the deep one. Left hand, plain gold band, and through it comes a whole marriage at once, too much to hold — a courthouse afternoon in 1987, Ruthanne's dress a color he could still name, two kids arriving years apart and both of them calling this same hand Dad at some point in some kitchen, some doorway, some hospital hallway where his knees wouldn't stop and hers didn't either. Whatever sent him back through decades of this office, this waiting room, this exact bench — the tremor was already in the hands before you arrived, small and constant, a leftover from thirty years of a body doing its best against sugar it couldn't sort out on its own. It is not painful. It is just always there, like weather.

The weight of him settles into you last — heavy through the gut, the give of a belly that's been there longer than not, knees that complain going from sitting to standing, feet already loose in shoes bought for arch support rather than speed. Sixty-four is not old in the way he thought sixty-four would be old, back when he was forty-five and dreading it. It is just slower, and tired in a low and permanent way that has nothing to do with sleep.

You look down. The hand with the ring on it is shaking, just slightly, the way it always does when it isn't being watched, and now it's being watched. You turn it over once, both sides, like you're checking it's real.

"Forty-eight," you say, out loud, to no one, to the woman at the desk who already called it twice — and you don't move yet, because somewhere behind your eyes there is still a wheel spinning, and no telling, not to you and not to Raymond Sobczak, who is not there anymore to wonder, how long you'll let it sit still before you spin it again.