Wendell Ashworth

You are wiping down Curtis Abernathy's forearm with a bar towel that smells like fryer grease, and the burn from the splash-back this morning has already started to blister, and that decides it. One day, nineteen hours, and this body has given you nothing but a bad knee and a manager yelling about ticket times. You liked the cleft chin in the mirror for about an hour. You do not like the burn. You go into the walk-in where nobody will see your face doing whatever it does when you open the site on a cracked phone screen, and you spin, and Curtis Abernathy stops being anybody's problem, including yours.

The chain is cold and real in your hand before you know whose hand it is.

You are bent at a gate, mid-motion, threading a padlock through a link, and the motion comes out wrong — the hasp catches, your fingers fumble it like they've never done it before — and then you do it again, slow, and it seats. You do the next ten latches the same way, checked, deliberate, on a gate you must have locked a thousand evenings and never once looked at while doing it. Somewhere behind your sternum a heart that has beaten sixty-four years keeps beating like nothing happened, and your knees ache with a dull, permanent ache that was already old before you arrived.

The denim shirt is soft in a way that only comes from years of washing, and it gives you the first flash: a woman's hands — not the girlfriend, the other one, the one who got away — buttoning this same shirt for him half a lifetime ago, laughing at something, before there was a girlfriend, before there were the two kids who are grown now and call on Sundays sometimes and don't call other times. Her name arrives with the smell of her, not with letters — Denise — and it hurts going down like it always has, a small clean hurt he has learned to carry the way he carries his back.

The cap gives you nothing but salt-sweat and a logo you don't need to read to know: seed company, decades of it, a man who has walked this same acreage since before some of these rows had names. The boots give you the whole morning — pulling them on at the edge of the bed in the dark, girlfriend still asleep, coffee going in the kitchen, the particular grunt he makes bending to lace them because the lower back doesn't forgive mornings anymore. He quit drinking somewhere in his forties without ceremony, just stopped wanting it, the way you stop wanting a person, though the smoking took longer to let go of and he still, without thinking, brings a hand up to touch the mole on his cheek the way he used to touch a cigarette to his lips.

The gate under your palm gives you weather — thirty years of it, frost and thaw and a chain that has needed replacing since spring. You feel how strong the forearms are despite the dad-bod softness over them, decades of hay and fence wire built into muscle that doesn't advertise itself. You feel the money too, distant and strange, sitting somewhere in accounts he doesn't check often, land paid off, more land than a man needs, and how none of it touches this particular ache in his hips at the end of a Friday. Church tomorrow, maybe — the girlfriend likes to go, he goes for her now more than for God, though God was there first, back when Denise was there too.

Your hand finds your own face on its own, thumb brushing the mole, an old unconscious habit that isn't yours and is now.

You look at your hands — his hands, dark and cracked at the knuckles, gate-grease under two nails — and you turn one over like you've never seen a palm before.

"Didn't lock that right the first time," you say to no one, to the empty field, to the diner sign losing its light down the road, "gotta be losing it."

Somewhere behind you a tractor sits rusting where it always sits, and somewhere ahead of you is a house with a woman in it waiting on dinner, and you don't know yet how long you get to walk back to her.