Tyler Kaczmarek

Victor's hands are not your hands. That's the trouble tonight, sitting at the kitchen table in the little rented house in Small-town Ohio, looking at knuckles that have known thirty-four years of table saws and cold mornings, at a wedding band you didn't put there and can't take off because taking it off would mean explaining to a wife who isn't yours why a stranger wants it gone. Forty seconds now, being him. You already know the sag of this chair, the smell of sawdust that never leaves a shop-man's shirts, the ache low in the back that comes from bending over lumber for two decades. None of it is unpleasant. That's almost the problem. It is fine, and mild, and small, and yours only in the way a rented coat is yours. Nine hundred and sixty-five men behind you and this one barely has the lights on yet. You are already reaching for the laptop before you've decided to. The page loads the way it always loads, patient, the wheel sitting there like it's been waiting up.

You don't examine the wanting too closely. You never do. It isn't boredom exactly and it isn't hunger exactly; it's more like an itch behind a life that isn't your own, the low hum of knowing there is always a door past this door. You pay. You spin.

—

The spoon is already turning the other way before you notice your hand doing it, and you don't decide that, it just happens, the little clockwise circle in the pan becoming counter-clockwise, a stir with someone else's wrist in it. Steam off the pan smells like garlic and cheap ground beef. There's a plate on the counter, one plate, white, chipped at the rim, and your — his — hand is salting the pan without tasting it first, out of habit, the way a man cooks for himself when nobody's watching to correct his seasoning. Behind you the window holds a rectangle of blue-black evening, a wide gray Detroit street going dark early under a low sky. You are standing in a kitchen you have never stood in, in a body nineteen years old, lean and warm and humming with a kind of readiness you had forgotten a body could have. Then your free hand, not asked, reaches up into the cabinet and brings down a second plate and sets it beside the first.

—

The shirt is what opens him first — plain black cotton, worn soft at the collar, and putting it on this morning comes back sleeve by sleeve, his arms lifting into it in a bedroom with the blinds still down, the smell of Nadia's shampoo still on the pillow, her voice from the bathroom asking if he was taking the late show tonight or if he'd be home for dinner, and him saying dinner, don't worry about it, I got it, and meaning it the way a man means a small promise he intends to keep. Second plate. He always sets two, some nights, out of a leftover reflex from basic — mess hall habits, a friend named Danny who used to eat off his tray when the line ran short — and some nights she's the second plate and some nights she's working a double at the hospital and the second plate just sits there, an old habit with nobody behind it, and he doesn't examine that either, he just does it, spoon in hand, because it feels wrong to cook like there's only one person in the world.

The jeans know the shape of a flight line — his knees remember kneeling on tarmac at dusk beside a C-17's landing gear, ear protection looped down around his neck the way it hangs in every photo of him, the roar of props even through foam, the particular ache across his shoulders from tie-down chains hauled hand over hand in cold wind coming off the runway. Twenty months in, still new enough that his crew chief calls him "kid" without malice. He likes the work more than he expected to. He likes the schedule less. He likes coming home to Nadia most of all, likes that she waits up some nights just to hear about the plane, likes that she doesn't ask him to be anything he isn't.

There's a girl before Nadia, a boy before that, both a long time ago, both fine, both nothing that keeps him up — he doesn't carry exes like wounds, he just doesn't have that kind of memory. There's church on Sundays when he's not on shift, his mother's voice reading scripture over a phone line because Detroit is far enough from where he grew up that visits are rare, and there's the gum — always the gum, jaw working without him noticing, a habit from quitting nicotine before he ever really started it, something to do with his mouth besides say the wrong thing. There's a night two weekends ago, a bar with three of the guys from the squadron, too many beers, singing badly in Danny's car with the windows down, feeling nineteen and endless. The shoes at the door are the ones he wore that night, scuffed at the toe, and for a second you're back in that car, laughing at nothing, young in a way that has nothing to do with age.

The spoon is still in his hand. The second plate sits there, empty, waiting on a woman who is on a shift somewhere in the city and doesn't know yet that dinner's ready, or that anything else has happened at all.

—

You look down at the hand holding the spoon — no scars on it, no marks, skin still faintly sun-warm from a whole day standing on concrete beside gray metal, and you turn it over slow, like you're checking it's real, palm then back then palm again, and it startles you a little how steady it is, how easy, how young.

"Smells good," you say out loud, to no one, to the empty kitchen, to the second plate, and you don't know yet if that's a thing he would've said or a thing you just needed to hear his voice do — and you don't know, standing there in his socks on his floor with his dinner going cold in the pan, how long you get to find out.