Reginald Pace

Cody Shumate's barracks room smells like gun oil and cheap fabric softener, and you have been him for five minutes, and five minutes is long enough to know this one is a mistake. Twenty-two, hazel-eyed, all that muscle wound up tight even asleep-standing, and nothing in him but a nervous hum you didn't choose and can't turn off — his heart still going from whatever he was doing before you landed, some argument, some ache you didn't get the whole shape of. You paid for young and got young's problem: a body that won't sit still under you, a mind that keeps skipping tracks before you can read it. It is the middle of the night here, Rural Texas, everyone on the post asleep but you, and you are standing in his dark room amazed at how little you want to stay. So you find the phone. You open the site. The wheel is already spinning before you've decided to let it.

The kitchen comes up around you mid-breath, dark and warm, a pendant light throwing one gold circle over a granite island, and you are shorter now, thicker through the shoulders, a weight in the chest and gut that the last body didn't have. Your thumb is lifted off a phone screen, hanging there over a price that isn't yours — $14,200, a watch, a joke of a number — and you watch the hand that isn't your hand set the phone face-down on the counter and then just... stop. Not put down. Abandoned. That's the whole arrival: a thumb lifting, a phone turning over, a stillness that goes on a beat too long for a man just checking his phone.

The counter is cool and grained under your palm and it comes first through the skin — his hand pressed flat there most mornings, coffee going cold beside it, some talk show murmuring low so it doesn't wake her. Her. The word arrives before the woman does: Denise, asleep two rooms over right now, her breathing slow through the wall, and the bed that's his and hers, and how he still sometimes wakes reaching for the wrong side of it out of forty years of habit, because there was a wife before Denise, and a divorce that took the house and half the pension and left him with visitation and a folding chair at two graduations. Two kids, grown now, a daughter in Rockford who calls on Sundays and a son who doesn't call enough, and Reginald forgives him for it every single time because forgiving is easier than the alternative at fifty-five.

The polo is against your chest next, navy, cotton gone soft from a hundred washes, and it gives you the morning he put it on — not this morning, some ordinary one, the reach into the closet, the drag of it over his head, the little grunt because his right shoulder's been catching since the warehouse job, twenty-two years of pallets and forklifts that paid for this condo and these countertops and none of the watches on that screen. Retired eleven months now and still doesn't know what to do with a Tuesday. The jacket zips up around old muscle that still answers when called on — push-ups every morning out of stubbornness, not vanity — and under the sleeve, the ink on his right arm wakes up too: an eagle, a rose, colors gone soft at the edges, put there at twenty-three in a shop off Halsted with a woman named Priscilla who is not Denise and not the ex-wife either, a whole life folded into that half sleeve that nobody asks about anymore.

The scar through his eyebrow itches, phantom, and gives you nothing but a flash — a bar, a stool, somebody's ring catching him wrong, decades gone — before it's swallowed by church, by Denise's hand in his in a pew that isn't this century's decorating taste, by the specific shame of scrolling watches he cannot afford in a kitchen he's proud of, thumb moving because his hands don't like being empty, because ADHD didn't get a name until he was forty-nine years old and by then he'd already built a whole life around white-knuckling it. He has never smoked. He has never had a drink. He bites his nails down to nothing and Denise swats his hand out of his mouth like he's twelve. Under the tracks a train goes by outside, close enough to shake the glass, and you feel how normal that sound is to him, how it's just Tuesday, just Saturday, just the middle of any night in this life.

You look down. Your hand — his hand — sits open on dark granite, nails bitten to the quick, a thin white scar of its own knowledge running under the eagle tattoo, older and heavier and more used than the one you had five minutes and forty years ago.

"Cheap," you say, to nobody, and you don't mean the watch.