Wade Pemberton

The line is dead for the night, the fryer's cooling, and Danny Kowalczyk's hands smell like burnt garlic and bleach. Three hours in this body and already you know it: the ache low in his back from standing, the little bones in his feet that never stopped complaining, the way his manager looked at him like he was furniture. Twenty-four years old and none of it his. It was fun for about forty minutes. Then it was just a body clocking a shift that isn't yours to clock, at a job you didn't earn and don't want, and the phone in the greasy apron pocket says 11:52 and the walk-in door needs restocking and you think, no. Not tonight. You find a corner by the dumpsters, pull up the site on a cracked screen with a thumb that isn't yours, and spin.

There is no elevator, no falling, no in-between. There is a bar of white light lying hot across a man's closed eyes, and then they are open, and they are yours.

You are on your side on a mattress with no frame, knees drawn up, one arm dead asleep beneath your own weight. Boots are on the floor by the bed, empty, standing the way boots stand when a man toed them off without bending down. A lamp burns orange somewhere behind you. The window is taped over in kitchen foil, and the foil has come loose at one corner, and that is the whole crime — a strip of Texas evening finding a crack and laying itself across a sleeping face until the face wakes up wrong.

The body is fifty-six and heavier through the middle than the one you left, arms softer, a low tightness behind the sternum that isn't pain yet, just cholesterol doing its slow arithmetic somewhere in a vein. The left cheek stings faintly from being mashed into a pillow for however many hours — hours that were day to him, evening now, night not far off, the whole clock of him turned backward against the world's. There's a mole up high on the cheekbone, and your hand — no, his hand — finds it without meaning to, an old habit of a man checking a bruise that healed years ago and left a mark instead.

Then the shirt.

It's a gray T-shirt, soft with age, and the second your shoulders settle into the memory of putting it on, there is Wade Pemberton, this morning, which was to him afternoon: standing in front of a mirror with a crack through it, threading his arms through short sleeves, the ceiling fan clicking overhead because the bearing's going and he keeps saying he'll fix it. He thinks about Carol, his wife, who left a plate of eggs cooling on the counter three hours ago because that's when he gets up, always has, twenty years of nights at the Diamond Creek casino table have bent the whole house's clock around him and she still does it, still makes the eggs, and some part of him that never says anything out loud is grateful in a way he doesn't have the words for.

The trousers next — his work trousers, black, already on him, slept in, and touching the seam at the knee gives you the felt of the blackjack table, the exact green of it under can-lights, chips clicking through his fingers in stacks of twenty without him looking down, twenty-two years of that motion worn so deep into the hands it doesn't need him anymore. A stool he doesn't sit on because the pit boss doesn't like it. The particular ache that lives in his lower back by 4 a.m. A man across the table losing eight hundred dollars with a face like weather. Wade dealing it out flat, professional, the mole on his cheek catching the rail lights when he turns to call the count.

The wedding band, when his fingers brush it, is warmer than skin should be. Carol at twenty-six in a dress she still has in a box. Three kids grown now — a fourth call last week he still hasn't returned. A woman before Carol, no — after, recent, a woman named Renee who is not his wife and who he has not called back either, and the not-calling-back of both of them sits in his chest like something swallowed wrong. He quit drinking somewhere in there, doesn't remember deciding to, just noticed one year he didn't anymore. There's a tin of dip in the trouser pocket, and just brushing it against his hip brings the taste of it, sharp and mineral, the thing he does instead.

Under it all, the body: fifty-six, tired in a specific and total way that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with graveyard shift, a spine that knows exactly how far it can bend before the felt-table crouch turns into something worse, hands that are stronger than they look, quick, sure, made for small precise motions and nothing else anymore.

Your hand — his hand — comes up in the last of that dying bar of window-light, and you turn it over, palm up, like it might tell you something it hasn't already.

You say, out loud, to the taped-over window and the empty boots and nobody: "Eggs are gonna be cold."