Terrence Abadie

You are Marquis Delahoussaye for the fourth minute of your life, standing in his kitchen in Small-town Ohio in the gray before dawn, and already you know this one won't do. His shoulders are good, thick and low, a painter's shoulders, but there's a smell of primer under his nails that won't wash and a woman's voice down the hall you don't want to meet, and four minutes is long enough to learn that his mortgage is later than yours ever was and that the scar through his eyebrow itches when he's about to be shouted at. You didn't spin for him. You spun for the itch that never leaves you, the one that isn't his — the flat, gray hunger to be someone else's ordinary for a while, someone whose Wednesday you haven't ruined yet. You open the site on his phone with his own thumbprint, feel that small theft like a held breath, and you spin.

The kitchen goes. Miami arrives instead, mid-motion, and you are shorter, heavier, thumb still lifted an inch off the glass like it's waiting for permission to come back down. Overhead light the color of a low bulb left on too many nights. A phone screen with a chronograph on it, price like a second rent. You feel the lift in your own chest before you understand it's not yours — his breath catching at that number — and then the hand, wide, blunt-knuckled, sets the phone face-down on the counter of its own accord, and does not pick it back up.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. Green, short-sleeved, buttons done up crooked at the collar because he'd rushed — this morning, before the sun, before the crew call, he'd stood in front of a mirror that wasn't quite level and buttoned it wrong twice, thinking about a phone call he hadn't made yet to his ex, Danielle, who still texts him about nothing at hours that aren't nothing. He loves his wife. He tells himself that in the mirror sometimes, out loud, like checking a level with a bubble that won't sit still. Marisol is asleep two rooms over with their younger one wedged into the crook of her arm, and the shirt remembers the weight of that room even though you are standing in the kitchen — the sound machine, the AC unit rattling wet Miami air into something almost cool.

The tool belt isn't on him now, it's evening-quiet in a duffel by the door, but your hand knows its buckle anyway, knows the particular ache low in the back that comes from four hundred sixty roofs, give or take, hips and knees the exact wrongness of thirty going on fifty. Heavy build carrying itself up a ladder every day for money that never once caught up to the bills. You feel the callus map of his palms against the countertop — hammer callus, low ridge; shingle-cut nicks healed into little seams. His hands: they want a lighter right now, want the flip-open-flip-shut of it though there's no cigarette ever at the end of that, hasn't been since he was nineteen and scared of his bishop finding out. He just likes the weight, the click. There's one in his pocket, and touching the denim over it brings back a whole afternoon — sitting on a ridge beam at lunch with the town spread out flat and pastel below him, flicking the lighter open and shut while the other guys talked, thinking about the watch he'd never buy and the wedding band that cost him three weeks of side work and was worth every hour of it.

The ring is small and plain and it opens the widest door of all: a wedding in a stake center that smelled like carpet cleaner and gardenias, Marisol's mother crying too hard, his own father's hand heavy and proud on the back of his neck. Two kids since. A recent stretch with Danielle that he ended and started and ended again before Marisol ever knew there'd been anything to end, and the guilt of that sits in him now like a low steady weather, not sharp, just always there, the reason his thumb kept sliding toward a watch he couldn't afford — like buying himself forgiveness in stainless steel. He works nights sometimes when a crew's behind, catches sleep in pieces; this is one of those Wednesdays, awake in the dark hour when decent men are still down, and the kitchen light over the stove is the only one on in the whole complex.

You feel all of it land at once, the good and the ordinary and the small mean secret, and none of it is enough to keep. You never keep any of it.

You look at your own hand — his hand — turning it slow under the ugly kitchen bulb, ring catching light, the calluses gone stranger under a stare that isn't the one that earned them. Then you lift your eyes to nothing in particular, to the dark window with your own blurred shape in it, and you say, out loud, in his voice, not yours:

"Not yet."