Reynaldo Cabezas

The apartment is quiet in the particular way apartments get at the end of a week nobody enjoyed. Screen light. The blinds down. You have read about this site the way you read about most things you don't believe — three tabs deep, half-convinced it's a joke, half-convinced of nothing, just tired and curious in that late-hour way that used to be enough to keep you up till two doing nothing at all. You have wanted this specific nothing since you were young enough that you don't remember starting to want it: to be someone else, actually, not in the movie-theater way. vessel.cards loads slow on purpose, like it wants you to feel the wait. A wheel, plain as a raffle. You pay what it asks without letting yourself think about it as a decision. You spin.

There is no sensation of going anywhere. There is only here, suddenly, which is a bed, which is dark but for a blade of streetlight cut by a gap in the curtain, and an arm that isn't reaching for anything hanging off the edge of a mattress that isn't yours because nothing has ever been yours, not like this. The breath in this chest catches on something ragged and then, in the space of one exhale, isn't ragged anymore. The arm draws itself up. The body turns onto its back like it has decided something, hands coming to rest folded on the chest, a posture this man has apparently never once slept in, not that you'd know, not that anyone would, because there's no one awake to see it.

It is morning where you were. It is not morning here — or it is, but the wrong kind, the kind before a shift that runs against the sun, and the room still holds the used-up smell of a house that goes to sleep out of order with the rest of the street. You lie still inside a stranger's weight. Dad-bod thick through the middle, shorter than you expected a man to feel from the inside, which is a strange thing to expect anything about. The pillow under the back of a head that's bald far up the forehead, hair gone silver-gray and grown long at the sides like it's compensating. A small hard bump of metal in the upper curve of one ear. A wedding band, plain, worn thin at the inside curve of the left ring finger, because a hand has been closing around tool grips and steering wheels and other hands for thirty years with that ring still on it.

The sheet under your palm gives you the first of it — cheap cotton, softened by a hundred washes, and with it comes a woman's voice saying his name the way she says it when she's not mad, just tired, Reynaldo, and a kitchen table with a coffee going cold and a stack of bills he's not opened yet. His wife. Not a face all at once but a whole weather system of one — her hand flat on his chest exactly where his hands are folded now, some anniversary, some fight, some ordinary Tuesday indistinguishable from a thousand others, which is its own kind of love, he'd never say that out loud but the feeling comes through anyway, unwilled and specific and heavy the way only twenty-some years can be heavy.

The pillowcase gives you almost nothing, just the smell of it, his own sweat and the particular mildew of a window unit that runs all August. But the T-shirt against your back, damp, worn thin at the collar — that one opens wider. Sleeves he's pulled over these same arms ten thousand mornings, and one morning in particular surfaces whole: standing at the dresser before a shift, aching in both shoulders already before the work has even started, easing the shirt down over a body that used to be able to take a twelve-hour day without complaint and now files a complaint about everything, quietly, to no one. Reflux climbing his throat before he's had a single cup of coffee. A rosary looped once around the lamp on the nightstand that he touches sometimes without praying, just touching. Three kids' names arriving together, overlapping, a whole loud dinner table of them, one who calls only when she needs money and one who doesn't call enough and one still young enough to run at him when he comes through the door black to the elbows. And underneath the kids, quieter, an old ex he hasn't thought about on purpose in years surfacing anyway the way exes do, unbidden, a summer before the wife, a version of himself that felt lighter, that he sometimes misses without meaning anything by it.

The debt comes in through nothing you're touching, just sits in the body like weather — six figures underwater on a house and a truck and a boat he shouldn't have bought, a number he does math around instead of at, the specific American shame of being fifty-one and still owing more than he's worth. A bottle under the sink giving itself away by the smell alone, whiskey, most nights, not a secret exactly, just a fact everyone in the house has learned to route around.

His body underneath it all: solid, soft at the middle, strong through the back and forearms in the particular way that isn't gym-strength but pit-strength, the kind that shows up in how easily the hands would close around a shovel handle if there were one here, which there isn't, just cotton sheets and a ring and an ache low in one hip that flares when the weather turns.

You look at your hands. His hands — thick-fingered, a white scar of old callus across the base of the thumb that the facts never gave you and you don't add anything to, just notice it's there, notice the ring catching the streetlight thin as a wire. You turn the hand over once, like checking it's real, like checking it's yours.

You lift your eyes toward the gap in the curtain, toward the ceiling, toward nothing in particular, and you say, quiet, to the dark room and nobody in it:

"Okay."

Because that's all there is to say to a wife you haven't met yet and three kids still asleep down the hall and a debt that isn't yours to fix and a shift that starts whenever this body's clock says it does — okay, this is real, this is happening, and there is no telling, not to you and not to him, not ever, how long you get to stay.