Reggie Two Bears

The chair under you is too big and the tie you're wearing is somebody's idea of a joke — Marco's tie, Marco's blazer, Marco's accountant salary sitting untouched in an account you don't care about. You've been him an hour and twenty-five minutes and the whole time his phone kept buzzing on the table, a woman's name on the screen, and you understand without checking that she is angry at Marco for something you didn't do and can't fix and don't want to. Green eyes in the window reflection. Small hands. A body built for spreadsheets, not for anything you'd call living. It's Monday afternoon in New York and the light through the office blinds is doing that flat corporate thing, and you are so bored you could scream, and boredom, for you, has only ever had the one cure. You open the laptop. The wheel is already loaded from three hundred and thirty-seven times before. You spin it not looking for anything in particular. That's almost the worst part — there isn't even a want, just the itch, and the itch is enough.

The bread basket is the first thing you feel, wicker against two fingers, untouched, and across the table a woman's face is arranging itself into patience she doesn't have anymore. Your body — his body — is broader than any you've worn in a while, a gut pressing warm against a table edge, and your mouth is already moving, already three words into something that started as *I'm sorry, I know I've been* — and you don't know how it was going to end because you didn't start it, he did, half a second ago, and now the sentence is yours to land. You hear it come out of you, easy, too loud, carrying to the four-top behind her — *I'm sorry, I know I've been somewhere else all night* — and it lands like a real thought instead of the nothing it is. The water glass is under your right hand. You give it a quarter turn without meaning to and then you stop, because stopping it is not yours yet, that's a habit that belongs to someone who hasn't arrived all the way.

It arrives through the glass first — cool, ridged, an anchor — and something in the wrist recognizes it, has held a hundred glasses like it in restaurants he doesn't remember choosing. Then the shirt. Not the collar shirt from the photograph, something newer, a small printed thing he bought because Denise — the daughter, not the ex — told him plain colors made him look like he was going to a funeral, and he'd laughed and bought three of them just to prove he could still take a joke about himself. Putting it on this morning: the reach behind for the second button that his shoulder fights him on now, the little grunt he doesn't let anyone hear, the lower back seizing for a second when he bent to pull socks on and having to breathe through it, hand flat on the dresser, waiting for it to pass the way it always eventually passes. Sixty-five years of jobsites in that back. Fine tremor of it now even sitting still.

The tan line on the ring finger comes next, pale ghost of a band that hasn't sat there in six years, and with it: Carla, not this woman across from him but the one before, the one who used to steal bread out of the basket before he could and butter it wrong, too much, laughing when he complained. Divorce papers on a kitchen table he built himself, the good kitchen table, walnut, the last big thing he made with his hands just for the pleasure of it instead of a paycheck. Two kids, grown now, one who calls every Sunday and one who calls when he needs something, and Reggie loves them both the same even though it costs different amounts. Money that came later than the marriage did, more of it than he ever figured out how to want, sitting in accounts while he still puts on the boots most days because a body that's worked its whole life doesn't know what else to do with a Monday.

The sleeve tattoo prickles under the shirt fabric where it always does in air conditioning, old ink, tribal, done in his thirties in a shop that isn't there anymore, and it brings back the sound of a router biting into plywood, sawdust hanging gold in a window's worth of morning light, the particular ache in both knees going down a ladder that he's stopped mentioning to anyone because mentioning it makes it more real. Church on Sundays when he can make himself go, less lately, God patient with him the way God is supposed to be. A beer he doesn't drink anymore, hasn't in years, quietly, without a program or a speech, just noticing one day the want wasn't there. His hands want to crack the knuckles right now, both hands, that small percussion that means nothing and means he's thinking about something else entirely — usually the ex, this one, the woman across the table who is not this date, who he was picturing when he lost the thread of his own sentence.

The date across from him — new, a coworker's cousin, a bad idea from the start — is still watching him with her patience running out, and you feel the whole weight of how badly this was already going before you ever arrived, how relieved some small stubborn part of him would be to be finished with it.

You look down at your hand on the glass — thick fingers, a callus map you didn't earn, the pale strip where a ring isn't — and turn it over once like it might explain itself. Then you look up, past her, into the middle distance where the phone camera would be if there were one.

"Sorry," you say, in his voice, easy and carrying. "Lost my train of thought there. Happens more than it used to."