Walter Prusinski

Patrick Muldowney's hands won't stop shaking, and they've only been his for a minute.

You feel it before you feel anything else — this body doesn't know how to be still. Twenty-eight years old, green eyes, a burn scar tightness across one forearm you haven't earned yet, and underneath the skin a current like a live wire left in the rain. You spun for athletic. You spun for young. You got a man who apparently vibrates. Somewhere in the last sixty seconds, standing in a Philadelphia shop that smells like flux and hot metal, you understood you'd made a mistake — not a bad body, just the wrong problem. Wrong pulse. You wanted quiet and got a furnace. So you go back to the site on his phone, thumb trembling against the glass with a tremor that isn't nerves, it's just how he runs, and you spin again before you've even let yourself finish being him.

The wheel doesn't care what you're leaving. It gives you a stove.

You arrive already turning a spoon the wrong direction, and the taste that hits your mouth a half-second later is salt, too much of it, going into a pan you didn't season. Your hand — his hand, thick-knuckled, a life older than the last one — sets the spoon down without deciding to. There is a second plate now on the counter, and you didn't put it there, not really; the body did, on its own errand, before you'd finished landing in it.

Then the kitchen comes in through what you're touching, the way it always does.

The shirt first — worn cotton, sun-faded to the color of a dry field, and it brings back a hanger in a closet in Coral Gables, this exact shirt taken down this exact morning with a thought behind it: comfortable, off-day, nobody to impress. Walter dressed alone today the way he dresses most days, humming something from the radio, patting the collar flat out of habit though no one was there to see it sit wrong. The buttons remember his fingers, slower now than they used to be, not because arthritis has come but because there is no longer any hurry in a life that doesn't require one.

The pan handle gives you more — twelve-hour shifts, the particular ache of standing at a nurses' station at two in the morning charting under lights that hum, his knees complaining on the tile, thirty years of night shift bending a man's clock until noon feels like midnight and midnight feels like nothing. This, on the other side of the country's day, is his evening. His body has no idea what hour it actually is anymore. It only knows hungry, and tired, and the particular relief of being home and answerable to no one.

The counter under your palm holds the two kids — a daughter's wedding he paid for outright and didn't blink, a son somewhere in Orlando who calls on Sundays out of duty more than want, and Walter accepting that the way he accepts most disappointments now, without much noise. The money is there in the walls somehow, in the ease of the whole apartment despite the ordinary dishes, the plain cabinets — a man who could afford better and never saw the point of wanting it.

And there's a woman who isn't in the room but is in the second plate. Not a wife. An old flame, decades gone and still somehow present at this counter every time he cooks enough for two out of muscle memory alone and has to catch himself, has to put the extra plate back — except tonight his hands set it out instead, deliberate this time, a small private permission he gives himself only when nobody's watching. Cheryl. The name arrives soft, unforced, from nowhere and everywhere — thirty years old and it still costs him something to set that plate down. He never remarried. He never really tried.

Your leg is bouncing. Has been the whole time, under the counter, a tic this body runs without you, some current of its own that has nothing to do with wanting. Blood pressure pills in the cabinet by the sink, taken most mornings, sometimes forgotten — that flash comes through the counter edge, cool laminate, a hundred mornings of orange juice and a white capsule washed down fast.

You feel how little this body hurries anymore, and how much it used to.

You look down at the hand holding the spoon — spotted faintly, thinning-skinned at the knuckle, a stranger's hand doing something competent it's done ten thousand times. You turn it over slow, watching light move across the pan's steam catching in the kitchen window, and something in you that was, one minute ago, twenty-eight years old and shaking, goes almost peaceful.

You lift your eyes toward the window glass, where the reflection is a fifty-five-year-old man you have never seen from the front until just now.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the glass, to whichever one of you it was actually meant for.