Victor Reyna-Solis

The garage smells like brake cleaner and burnt coffee, and it is Leo Yazzie's smell, not yours, even fourteen minutes in. That is the thing that decides it. You are sitting on the rolling stool with the lazy eye drifting a half-degree off true, and you have just tried to read a torque spec off a phone screen propped against a toolbox, and the number keeps sliding because his eye won't track the way you want it to. Fourteen minutes of a small, private betrayal, over and over, every time you look anywhere. It's not pain. It's not even really a problem. It's just wrong in a way that itches, the way a word on the tip of your tongue itches, and you know — the way you have known nine hundred and sixty-four times before — that you are not going to spend an evening arguing with a body over whether it will look where you tell it to. You wipe your hands on a rag that isn't clean, pull out your phone, and open vessel.cards with Leo's thumb, already impatient with him.

The wheel spins. It always looks cheap, a dollar-store crown of color, and it always stops on a life.

—

The spoon is already turning the other way before you finish arriving, your hand closing around a wooden handle worn smooth in the bowl of a stranger's palm, and the pan under it ticks with heat and the smell coming up is garlic and something with tomato in it, and your back — his back — is to a room you have not seen yet, a kitchen narrow as a hallway, a window gone the flat dark blue of a Monday evening in a place with weather. You salt the pan. You do not taste it. Some reflex that is not yours and not quite gone yet reaches up into the cabinet and takes down a second plate, sets it beside the first one on the counter, and only once it's down do you feel the wrongness of it land somewhere behind your own eyes — his eyes now — a full second late, like a light switch flipped before the bulb catches.

—

The shirt is what opens first. Not the flannel — he's not wearing that now, just a soft dark sweater, but your arms remember the flannel anyway, remember rolling the cuffs back that morning over the tattoos, black tribal bands he got at twenty-two in a shop in Columbus with a guy named Petey who is dead now, motorcycle, three years back, and the memory comes with a small flat grief that isn't dramatic, just there, the way you'd feel a doorframe you'd walked into a hundred times. The tool belt this morning, looping it on, the particular hip-drop hitch of it settling, the hammer's weight finding the same worn notch on his thigh it always finds. Framing today — a slab still pale and fresh-swept, chalk lines snapped straight, the nail gun's hose dragging behind him like something on a leash, the compressor's stutter-cough, sun on the back of his neck, and under all of it his hands doing the math his head doesn't have to: sixteen on center, toe-nail here, plumb there, a body that knows lumber the way another body knows scripture.

The spoon in your hand gives you more: her, the ex, sitting on the counter right where that second plate now sits, swinging her heels against the cabinet door while he cooked, laughing at something, months ago, before whatever it was that ended it — the memory doesn't hand you the ending, only the missing shape of her where the shape used to be, and his hand takes down that second plate every night out of some muscle that hasn't caught up to being alone yet, and every night he notices, and every night it still costs him something small.

The floor under your feet is the floor of a house he rents two blocks off a main street with one stoplight and a diner that closed the year the highway went in around it instead of through it. Mass on Sundays when he remembers, which is most Sundays, more out of his mother's voice in his head than any certainty of his own. A beer he doesn't drink anymore — three years sober-ish, no ceremony to it, just stopped wanting the mornings that came after. Cigarettes the same, quit for no better reason than that a hand that isn't reaching for a lighter is a hand that's free to do something else. That hand, when it isn't holding a spoon or a hammer, drifts up over his scalp, over hair he didn't used to wear long, a habit from thinking too hard about a wall that isn't square or a woman who isn't calling, and it does it now, unbidden, dragging back through dark brown parted down the middle, and the gesture arrives whole, a decade of it, before you even decide to let the arm move.

Freckles under your fingers when you touch your own face — his face — scattered across the nose, the cheeks, a small vain private thing he's never said out loud to anyone, that he likes his face fine, that a girl in high school once called them constellations and he never forgot it and never told her he never forgot it.

—

You look down at the hand still on the spoon, turn it over, knuckles and small white scars and a burr of something like sawdust ground into the pad of one finger that no shower gets all the way out, and it is such an ordinary hand that for a second you just hold it up to the stove light like it's the first hand you've ever been given, which it isn't, not by nine hundred and sixty-four.

You look up, past the second plate, into the dark window with your own reflection floating on it over the blue evening outside.

"Sit down, Vic," you say to no one, in his voice, and you almost believe it's an apology.