Ricky Dale Navarro

Curt Hendershot's dimples are still doing their work when you push back from the desk in his office, in his good chair, with the whole morning of Ohio gray in the window. You have worn him for less than a minute. You are sixty seconds into a man who has everything, a corner office and a boat and a wife who texts hearts. And what he has is a tremor. It lives in the right hand, a fine hum under the skin that started when you reached for the coffee, and you cannot stand it, and you cannot fix it. A man who shakes cannot sign. A man who shakes is going to be asked questions at nine-thirty by people who love him. So you open the page with the wheel and you pay, and the tremor goes on pleading in his hand while you spin. It clicks down through faces. It stops.

The wrench is already in your fist, and your arm is over your head.

Something is wrong with the motion. Your wrist turns a quarter-inch too soon and the box end skids off the bolt. Then you do it again slowly, seat it, and turn. Then ten more, each one checked, each one a small proof, on a bolt that has never needed one.

The light is white and flat in the open bay. Your leg is bouncing, you notice, a heel drumming the concrete without your leave. A rag hangs from the back pocket, and the underside of a car sits above your face like a low gray sky.

The shirt comes first. Cotton gone soft at the elbows, buttoned to the cuffs against the sun, and the cuffs pull at your forearms as you reach, and he is there: a closet door, a bedroom with the blinds shut, the cuff buttons done one-handed and badly because the other hand was holding a glass. Last night's glass. The morning had a taste, and he brushed his teeth twice. Under the shirt your back is hot and sore, a stripe low on the spine from leaning under cars for years. The wrench handle is warm and knurled and knows its work. It gives you his father's garage, a boy handing up sockets in the right order, praised once, and the memory has the quality of a coin kept in a pocket for decades.

The floor is cold through the boot soles. The beard prickles at your jaw when you swallow. There is a girl, Marisol, on the edge of everything, laughing at his hair and pushing it behind his ears, and a dread attached to her, a fear of being found out in the mornings. His mouth is dry. His hands want a drink and say so politely. Twenty-six years of strength sit in the shoulders, easy and real, and under it a shake that is only thirst.

You lower the wrench and look at his hand. It is broad, creased black at the knuckles, steady. You turn it over. Then you lift your eyes to the open street, the turquoise house, the glare.

"Well," you say, in his low voice. "Let's see how long you last."