Suresh Bhandari

The dock is quiet under you at this hour, container stacks throwing long blue shadow, and your knuckles ache the way Ezequiel Marrufo's knuckles have always ached, that once-broken nose still faintly wrong when you breathe through it. You've had him three days. Long enough. The gray-silver hair, the good back, the wife who calls him mijo on the phone in a voice that isn't for you — none of it is the problem. The problem is smaller than that: you're bored in a way that has a texture, like standing at a window in a house you didn't choose. Thirty-one and strong and it still isn't enough, because it was never about strong. You open the site on a cracked phone screen, thumb over the wheel, and something in you that has no name says again, and you spin sitting exactly where you are, mid-morning, mid-nothing, and the wheel doesn't care that it's the same Saturday for both of you, just a different hour of it.

The dolly handle is under your palms before you know they're your palms — narrower, older, a wedding band clicking once against the metal. Cold. Your — his — breath comes short and high in a chest that isn't built for the weight it's carrying. The couch is halfway onto the lip of the truck bed, standing on end, and your hands are already correcting a grip gone half a second wrong, walking it back, doing the same lift again slow and stupid and right. Ten more after that come out checked, each one, a man double-counting a thing his body has never needed counted.

The shirt is what opens first — damp cotton dragging at your back, salt-stiff, and under it a whole morning arrives sleeve by sleeve: him at the dresser in the blue dark, diabetic kit zipped shut on the nightstand, the shirt going on inside out once and getting laughed at by nobody because his wife was still asleep, turned away from him in a way that used to mean something and now just means six-fifteen. He'd stood there a second with the shirt right-side-out in his hands, feeling the ex's name surface uninvited — Priya, three months gone from his life and still living behind his sternum some mornings, the last real fight replaying itself for no reason while he buttoned his jeans. He'd shaken it off the way he shakes off most things now. Cigar on the porch last night, one, the good kind he only lets himself have twice a month, watching the light do what it does here in August, going on and on refusing to end.

The dolly strap crossing your shoulder gives you the job — twenty-two years of couches and stairwells and other people's whole lives boxed and labeled, his knees gone soft at the joints from it, the ache that lives permanently behind both kneecaps now, the leg under you already starting its bounce though you're standing still, an old tremor with nowhere to go. Your palms know the wood grain of this exact dolly before your eyes report it. The scrapes on your knuckles — today's, small, red — came from a doorframe forty minutes ago and he didn't feel them happen, the way he stopped feeling most small hurts around fifty.

The eyebrow scar gives up nothing when you touch it, just old numbness, but the memory arrives sideways anyway, riding in on the smell of diesel off the truck: a warehouse ladder, nineteen years old, a rung that wasn't there. His mother's hands on his face after, in a language you don't have and he still dreams in sometimes. And then, closer, warmer — his daughter's photograph clipped to the truck's visor, glimpsed every single shift without ever quite being looked at, her graduation gown too big in the shoulders, him crying in the parking lot after and telling no one, not even his wife, especially not his wife, because there isn't a way to say it that doesn't sound like dying is on his mind, and it isn't, not really, it's just that the light does this in August and it undoes him a little every year.

The wife's voice isn't here yet but the ring is, warm now from his own hand's warmth, twenty-six years of it worn thin and easy, and with it the whole shape of a marriage that works because neither of them examines why, some nights just two people watching television with a bowl between them, her hand landing on his bouncing knee without either of them commenting on it anymore.

You look down. His hands — small, dark, familiar to no one but him — are still wrapped around the dolly handle, one knuckle bleeding a little into the couch's pale fabric. The leg is going, going, going, a motor that runs under him whether you drive it or not.

You say, out loud, to the empty curb and the parked snowmobile and the long gold light coming low through the spruce: "Okay. Okay, Suresh."

Not his name for you. His name for him. You are only borrowing the mouth it comes out of, and neither of you knows for how long.