Hands

A short story

Sergio leaned his long tanned arms out onto the bar.  He looked at his hands.  He had taken on the habit of looking at his hands as he grew older to see how much they resembled the hands of his father.

His father was dead.

The ropey blue-green veins under the pink, dry, parchment skin was what he remembered.

Sergio turned his hands over and inspected them more closely. The scars.  The scar of his wedding ring callousing that spot on the palm under the knuckles after so many years.

A ditch digger’s hands.  A peasant’s hands grown soft with white collar work.

Bony hands with no fat.  Skeleton’s hands.  Powerful and bony.  Articulate and wonderful hands.

Turning them, there on the knuckle of a slender little finger the pink scar of a wart removal in his youth.  So strange to think about now.  The cryo-ablation of that great seed wart.  So alien, yet part of him. Frozen off with dabs of liquid nitrogen from a smoking thermos by the kind dermatologist with smile wrinkles.

That crease there in the thumb by the nail.  An indentation now.  Cut deep in a drill accident in his 20’s working on that second house.  The ranch on a quarter acre lot.  One of those moments frozen in time when he knew it would happen but he held the metal tab and squeezed the drill trigger anyhow.  So much blood.  Such hubris, such folly.

The road map of his life in flesh.

Sergio reaches one strong and slender hand across the bar to grasp that pint glass of beer.  The cold condensation is wet on his palm.  Those strong fingers bring cool relief to his lips.

On the back of the left hand, lying like a crescent moon in the gap between the thumb and forefinger, a white scar.  He remembers that night in that first small house, not more than a converted cabin, with his young bride.

He was scraping up the old linoleum with a torch and a putty knife.  The push and slip and slice.  His father’s hands indeed.  His father’s putty knife and torch no doubt.  And like his father annoyed at having to slow the work to sop up the blood.

Sergio lifts his gaze from those hands and looks around the bar at the flotsam of transient workers and travelers and wonders.  He takes another long pull from the lovely cold beer.  That thirst not from his father.  From his Irish mother instead.

The long forearm laying in the bar like a lazy fish.  A round white scar in the arm hair.  He remembers it was a golf outing with his mates in his 30’s.  The obligatory cigars and drinks with the reunion bonhomie and a round on the links.  The lit cigar ironically hanging from his lips and cauterizing his arm on the backswing.

It’s funny the memories and the scars that life leaves us.

He rolls his palms up again to inspect them.

Are these his father’s hands?  These soft, loving hands?

These hands that have cupped breasts and grabbed hips in possessive passion.  These hands that have caressed, patted and consoled.

These hands.

These are not his father’s hands, but they are.

These are the busy hands of a life well lived.

Sergio asks for the check and pays the bill.  He signs the printout with his unique and harried scrawl.

He smiles broadly into the eyes of the bartender and reaches out to grasp his humanity in a firm confirmation of existence.