Roy Tackett

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Marlon Adderly's hands don't shake, and that's the first thing you notice, standing in his kitchen two minutes into being him, still tasting the welded seam of somebody else's Monday. Dimples in a mirror across the room. Black hair going gray at the temple you didn't choose. You spun for him yesterday — no, minutes ago, it hardly matters, time gets loose when you're new somewhere — and already the shine is off. He's fine. He's healthy, he's got money in a coffee can, a woman who calls him baby in a voice that means it. But two minutes in a body is nothing, and nothing is exactly what it feels like: a coat you tried on in a store, still warm from the last person, waiting to be someone else's. You didn't come this far to stand still in a kitchen. You open the site again on his phone, his thumb, his print unlocking a screen he half-remembers the code to, and the wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, which is its own kind of honesty.

It lands on a man mid-motion, and so are you.

The bin is halfway up the lip of the truck, brown plastic biting into two gloved palms, and for one wrong beat your arms don't know the geometry — you tip it too far, catch it, correct, and the whole practiced arc of the lift stutters like a record skipping. You set it down. Pick it up again slower. Do it right. Nobody on this crew is looking; the truck idles, the creek runs brown and quiet below a cable footbridge strung between the trees, and green shade lies over everything like a held breath. Your body is small — five foot six, skinny in a way that has nothing left to give, sixty-three years of mornings folded into it. Gloves stiff with old grime. A mole high on the left cheek that your fingers don't touch but somehow already know is there, the way a tongue knows a chipped tooth.

The gloves are what open him first. Leather gone hard at the knuckles, sweat-cured, twenty years molded to this specific grip, and through them comes a version of Roy Tackett that isn't words, just weight: the truck groaning up out of the holler before six, mist still sitting on the creek, the particular ache that lives now permanently in the lower back and has stopped being news. Ten thousand mornings collapsed into the shape of his hands on a bin lip. He does this and does this and does not think about doing it, which is why the one wrong lift feels, from inside, like waking up mid-sentence.

The coveralls come next — orange, reflective tape gone gray with wear, dark blooms of old stains down the sleeves — and dressing arrives backward, the way memory does when you're not asking for it politely. This morning: dark still, the trailer's one bulb buzzing, Linda already up making coffee she won't drink because her stomach's been bad, not looking at him but talking anyway, something about her sister, something about money, the same conversation they've had in a dozen forms for eleven years married. He answered her in monosyllables because the CPAP mask leaves a groove across his face for an hour after he wakes and his jaw doesn't want to work yet. He stepped into the legs of the coveralls sitting on the edge of the bed the way his own father used to, one leg then the other, patient with it, because rushing at his age just means starting over. The zipper always sticks a third of the way. It stuck this morning. He didn't think about it. His hands, which shake now when he isn't using them — you can feel it starting up behind the work, a faint idle tremor riding under the calm — steadied the second there was a task to hold them to, the way they always have, the way maybe they always will now that there's nobody driving who cares to notice.

There's a ring on the left hand, plain, gone thin with age, and it gives you Linda whole — not the wedding, which he barely remembers as an image, but a Tuesday eight months ago, her laughing at something on the television with her feet in his lap, ordinary as the creek. And under that, closer to the surface, snagging like a hangnail: a woman named Denise who isn't Linda, who he saw for four months two years back and told himself was nothing, and who still lives in him the way a burn lives in skin long after the mark fades — not guilt exactly, something quieter and more embarrassing, a door he closed and still checks is locked. He never told anyone. He never will. He's spiritual enough to think somebody's keeping a tally somewhere and not religious enough to ask forgiveness for it out loud.

The boots against the truck's step give you the rest — the exhaustion that isn't sadness, just a body sixty-three years deep in a life that never paid it much, the sleep that never lands right even with the mask hissing all night beside Linda's softer breathing, mornings that start with a headache behind the eyes that fades by the second bin. No children ever came, and there's a small permanent room in him shaped like that absence that he doesn't visit often. Nothing to his name worth counting. A creek. A bridge swaying on its cables in the green light. A truck that needs him at it, checked and rechecked, ten times careful on a job his hands used to do asleep.

You feel his tremor start to rise now that the lifting's done, now that there's nothing to occupy it, faint and constant, an old man's hands standing around with nothing to hold.

You look at them anyway. Turn them palm-up in the shade, the gloves creased soft with other mornings, and something in you — not him, never him again — goes quiet at how little this is worth and how completely it is yours regardless.

"Careful now," you say, to no one, in his voice, and you don't yet know if that's an apology or a warning, or how long you intend to keep it.