Roy Halbrook

The shop smells like borax and cold meat, and Nestor Aguilar's hands — your hands, for twenty-two hours and forty-six minutes now — are still tacky with hide paste when you close the walk-in and stop pretending you're going to finish the elk shoulder tonight. Somewhere behind the ribs you didn't ask for, there's a homesickness that isn't yours and never leaves: a dead man's dead man's dead man, stacked down through a hundred and fifty-two other Tuesdays. Nestor is fine. Nestor is good, actually — steady hands, a goatee he keeps oiled, freckles like a spray of shot across his knuckles. But fine is the whole problem. You have learned, a hundred and fifty-two times now, that the wanting doesn't come from being unhappy. It comes from remembering that the wheel is still sitting there, patient, unspent, and that somewhere right now a man is folding a sock he'll never remember folding. You wipe your palms on your apron, you don't tell yourself a reason, and you open the site on your phone with paste still under one nail.

You spin.

You are crouched. That's the first thing — low to a concrete floor, knees complaining in a way Nestor's twenty years younger frame never complained, one white athletic sock damp and heavy in your fist, the dryer door still swung open against your shoulder and breathing its warm cotton breath onto the side of your face. A fluorescent tube overhead ticks and hums. There is a wedding band pressing cool against the base of your ring finger, and it is not a ring you put there.

The sock in your hand gives it to you first, small and total: a woman's voice down the hall, half-laughing, half-worn-thin — Roy, they're gonna eat without you if you don't hurry — and three sets of feet on a floor that isn't concrete, that's cheap laminate with a soft spot by the kitchen table that everybody steps around without thinking. Roy Halbrook. Thirty-seven years on this earth and every single one of them fits somewhere in High Desert, Nevada, sagebrush close enough to touch the trailer steps, the sky some huge blue thing that doesn't care what time your shift starts.

The flannel shirt against your back opens next — it's the one from three years ago, Christmas, his wife's handwriting still in his head on the tag she'd written FOR MY FAVORITE HOST because he manages the dining room at Rosalie's out on the highway and comes home smelling like fry oil and other people's birthdays. Friday nights are the ones that matter, the full room, the wait list, the way he can look at forty tables at once and know exactly which ones are about to be trouble. He's good at that. He likes being good at that. There's a particular pride, small and daily, in being the guy who remembers your name after one visit, who slides a birthday kid a free scoop of ice cream because he has three of his own at home and knows what a kid's face does when nobody remembers.

The jeans know his knees — worse than they should be at thirty-seven, from eleven years of standing on tile. The sock in his fingers knows something else: whose foot it belongs to, the smallest one, seven years old and still losing shoes like they're contagious. There are more kids than that sock — three, maybe more, the memory doesn't hand you a number so much as a feeling of always one more voice in the hallway than you counted on.

He put this shirt on this morning not thinking about it at all — that's the thing the sleeve gives you, ordinary to the point of aching, one arm and then the other, buttons his fingers do without his eyes, a glance in the mirror at the beard he keeps close and neat because Sherry likes it that way and he likes doing what Sherry likes. He is skinny in a way that used to bother him at twenty-five and doesn't anymore. He is freckled everywhere the sun has ever touched him, which in this country is everywhere. He goes to church on Sundays that he actually believes in, not out of habit, and he quit drinking so long ago it isn't even a memory anymore, just an absence shaped like a decision. He has never smoked a cigarette in his life. What he has done, every day for years, is fold laundry fast and square-cornered, because his mother folded it that way and it is the one household thing he does better than his wife and he is, in some small ridiculous way he'd never say aloud, proud of that too.

The dryer's last warmth is leaving the sock in your hand. Somewhere close, water pipes tick in the trailer's walls. It is early afternoon out here, hard blue light through the one high window, while the body you left behind is standing in a walk-in cooler that doesn't exist in this man's whole life.

You look at your hand. It is thin, freckled to the knuckle, a plain gold band catching the fluorescent light wrong. It is not Nestor's hand and it never will be again.

"Sherry," you say, to the empty laundry room, in a voice you didn't grow up in, "I got the whites."