Ronald Iaccarino

Justin Carter's mail truck is still running, idling in the gravel by the box cluster, and you're sitting in his skin two minutes into being him, and already you know you don't want it. The tremor isn't in these hands — that's the thing you notice first, standing here in Kentucky sun with a rubber-banded stack of catalogs — his hands are steady, young, unbroken, and somehow that steadiness feels like a rebuke. You spun for a mail carrier and got a mail carrier: a route, a knee that clicks a little, brown eyes that squint against glare because he forgot his sunglasses again. Fine bones under thin skin. Twenty-seven years of a life that hasn't happened yet. You already miss the weight you don't have. Two minutes isn't long enough to want to stay somewhere, and you know — because you were just in him, actually in him — that Ronnie Iaccarino out in Pittsburgh has three-fifty in accounts and a wedding ring and hands that shake pouring coffee, and you've been carrying that man's whole shape around in your memory like a coin in a pocket ever since you let him go the first time, months and forty bodies ago. You liked being him once. You want to know if it still fits. You open the site on Justin's phone, thumb trembling because you're nervous now not him, and the wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, which is the honest truth of every time you've done this.

Your knees hit bedspread. Not gravel — bedspread, worn soft, and there's a smell of fabric softener and old cigarettes and something medicinal underneath it, and your hands are laced together loose in front of you, heavier than they were a half-second ago, knuckled, a ring biting cold into the left one. Light is going amber through a window you didn't choose. A clock on the nightstand reads a time that makes no sense for the tiredness sitting in this body's shoulders — deep tiredness, day's-end tiredness — and you understand distantly that here it is already evening sliding toward night, that this man's Monday is hours ahead of the one you just left, and that he was kneeling to talk to whatever he half-believes in before he does whatever a fifty-eight-year-old contractor does with the rest of his night. You'd said amen too soon. You'd started to rise. Now you're back down, forehead drifting toward the blanket, breath caught wrong in a throat you don't own yet.

And then the shirt gives you its first flash — gray cotton, thin at the collar from washing, and a hand that isn't yet fully yours smoothing it down this morning, tucking the tremor into stillness by pressing his palm flat to his own chest for a second before he could trust it with buttons. Ronnie doesn't rush mornings anymore. He learned that the year everything went sideways — the first marriage, the fights that were never about the thing they were about, Denise's face in the doorway the morning she said she was done, and how strange it was that he agreed with her before she finished the sentence. That's an old ache now, filed down smooth. There's a second wife's laugh in the kitchen underneath this memory, layered over it like new paint — Carla, patient in a way he still doesn't think he's earned, and two kids grown enough now that "the kids" means phone calls more than dinners, but good calls, the kind where nobody's performing.

The nightstand under your knuckles gives you the burn before you even reach for the memory of getting it — a flash of grinder-spark thirty years back, metal too close, the year he learned respect for anything with teeth. Your jaw prickles where the scar sits, tight in a way you now know is permanent, the neck skin that never quite matches. You touch it without meaning to and get, underneath your fingers, a whole life of people almost-not-looking at it, and him letting them, because a man who explains his scars too often sounds like he's still bleeding from them.

The tool belt isn't on you now, but your palms still know its weight, the hammer's balance without looking, thirty years of framing houses on hillsides that slide half an inch every winter, sawdust that gets into everything including, some mornings, his coffee. Your blood pressure medication is a shape you can feel in a memory of a bathroom cabinet, a pill swallowed dry more mornings than not. A pack a day sits behind your ribs as a want, not a memory — an itch already starting, not two minutes into being him, in whichever version of him this is.

The wedding band. Left hand. Cold, then warm as your own heat comes up under it. Carla's face arrives with it, unbidden, saying something like *you don't have to do it every night* about the praying, and him saying *I know* and doing it anyway, because it isn't really about God, it's about the ten quiet minutes where nothing is asking anything of him.

You look at your hands. They shake, just slightly, resting on the bedspread — his tremor, not memory now, present tense, yours to keep. You turn them over once like you're checking they're real.

You lift your eyes off them, into the lamp light, into whatever is watching.

"Two minutes," you say, half a laugh still caught in it, "I gave that kid two minutes."