Shawn Delancey

David Marchetti's knees hurt on the concrete floor of his own garage, and you have had exactly forty seconds to feel that, and forty seconds is enough. You are sitting on his stool, his gray chest hair matted with sweat under a coverall he half-unzipped, his phone propped against a tire iron with the site already loaded because some part of you — his hands, maybe, out of old habit, or maybe just you wearing him like a coat you never buttoned — pulled it up again before his heart even slowed from becoming him. Comfortable is not the word for how his lower back feels. Freckled forearms, a tremor he's had since he was forty, and a wedding ring he's not wearing because the wife is twelve years gone and he never talks about it. You didn't dislike him. You just remembered, sitting there, that you have been old a lot lately, soft and gray and aching a lot lately, and the wheel owes you nothing but it does owe you a spin. Monday, noon, Philadelphia, sun through a garage door left up six inches. You put your thumb on the screen before you can think better of it, which is the only way you ever do it.

The wheel turns somewhere that isn't anywhere, and then you are standing, not sitting, your shoulder bare and cold where sleeve should be but isn't yet, both hands wrapped around a pressure gauge hose with a reading rising wrong — you see it the same second he would have, a half-pound high, and the hand you're wearing corrects it on its own, smooth and sure and already past the mistake before you have words for mistake. Dusk light that is not dusk light here — late morning instead, hard and flat off the tarmac, and that wrongness sits in you for a second like missing a stair. The cargo plane's belly fills the whole sky above you. Ten more pressure checks come after that first corrected one, and every single one gets a second look it hasn't needed in years, because you are new in here and the hands know that even if nothing else does yet.

The coverall is giving it to you first — rougher against the skin than David's softness, olive drab washed a hundred times, and with it comes an hour, early, dark still, him buttoning this exact zipper in a room with one window and a roommate's alarm not yet gone off, the half-thought he had of her — Casey, her name arrives with the memory of the thought, not planned, just there — asleep forty minutes up the road, and a small flare of wanting to text her and deciding not to wake her. The reflective belt cinching at your waist brings back the dozen times he's cinched it too tight and the dozen times he's loosened it one notch, a small correction he makes without noticing he's correcting it. The ear defenders cold against the back of your neck bring a whole year: basic, the shout of it, a drill instructor's voice that isn't unkind in memory even though it wasn't kind at the time, and underneath that a church basement in a part of Pittsburgh with bad parking, his mother's hand on his shoulder the Sunday before he shipped, the particular feeling of being prayed over by people who meant it.

The gauge's handle, slick with a little oil, gives you his hands specifically — the calluses along two fingers that are new in the last year, knuckles that want cracking right now the way they always do mid-task, an old habit his girlfriend teases him for. Eleanor arrives with the forearm itself, the tattoo riding the muscle there, and it isn't a girlfriend's name or an ex's — it's his sister's daughter, born three days before a date he does not let himself think about straight through, because that same week in the hospital there was a scare with her and him twenty-three years old white-knuckled in a waiting room, swearing to God in the folding chair that he'd do anything, and the name went on his arm six weeks later in a shop off Route 51 that smelled like rubbing alcohol and incense, and he has never once regretted it despite what his CO said about keeping ink above the collar.

The tarmac under your boots gives you less — just heat, familiar heat, four years of it, the particular ache in his feet by hour six of a twelve-hour day, and a clean simple fact underneath everything else: he likes this work. He has never had a drink he needed and never wanted a cigarette and he thinks sometimes, standing exactly where you're standing, that this is the most honest tired he's ever felt, bone tired instead of the other kind. Casey's face comes once more, unprompted, laughing at something at a cookout last month, and it costs you nothing and him everything to let it go.

You look down. The gauge is still in your hands, needle settled, correct. Your knuckles ache to crack and you let them, one hand then the other, a man's habit now yours for as long as this lasts. You lift your eyes to the hangar light, to the shape of the plane's shadow falling long and early across the concrete, and you say, out loud, to no one standing close enough to hear it as strange:

"Didn't even feel that one."

Thirty feet away, if anyone had been close, they'd have seen a young man blink twice too slow and then go on with his hands exactly as before.