Adrián Eduardo Zamora

You are leaving Gerald because of the stairs.

Not the stairs themselves. The sound his knee makes on them, a small wet click on the fourth step down to the Toronto kitchen, and the way he stood there holding the rail for a count of five before going on. Sixty-two years of that. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you know the click is going to be there every morning, patient as a debt. His nose, once broken, whistles faintly on each breath in. His silver hair is cold at the temples. You sit at the screen in a house that smells like another man's dinner, Sunday dark against the window, and the wheel waits on the page. There is nothing wrong with him. That is the trouble. He works, he is a fine body to wear, and you can already feel how the next forty years of him would go. You pay. You spin.

The basement hums. A fluorescent tube buzzes overhead, and you are crouched, thighs folded, one sock in your right hand, the dryer's open mouth breathing heat onto your face. Humid air, detergent, damp concrete. Your knees are fine. Your back is fine. The weight of you sits low and solid, a wide, strong, thick-bodied heaviness that folds easily at the hip. Your fingers are already moving. They can't stand still.

The sock is gray and striped, warm as a living thing. Through it comes a flash in his feeling, not yours: a Tuesday, a boy in the third row holding up a worksheet with the answer finally right, and a pride so quiet it sits in the throat like a swallowed coin. Then it's gone.

You pull the load out in one armful. Warm cotton against your forearms. Under the long sleeve of the gray shirt, the skin of your arms prickles, and the sleeve pulls at the shoulder when you reach. You remember, in his hands, putting this shirt on: head through, left cuff tugged, right cuff tugged, the neck sitting the way it always does, soft from three hundred washes. Sweatpants after, one leg and then the other, standing on one foot against the bedroom wall because the floor was cold. Bare feet then, and now the shoes, scuffed leather, his toes pressing the worn insole where they have pressed for years.

You drop the load in the basket. Your hands start to fold before you decide anything. Shirt, sleeves in, halve, halve again, corner squared to corner. Fast. Exact. Another memory rises through the cotton: his mother in a kitchen in the Heights, snapping a towel flat, saying *así, mijo, con respeto*. The folding is how he prays when he isn't praying. The rosary, a pale bead-click, lives in his pocket against his thigh, and your hand finds it without asking. He doesn't drink. He never did. Somewhere upstairs is a drawer of crumpled shirts, because he saves the care for here, for the one place it costs nothing.

The concrete is cold through the soles. The tube hums. You have a little money put away and a classroom waiting tomorrow and no one to tell.

You look at your hands. Brown, broad, the ink-dark lines on the forearms hers, no, his, no, *yours*, the wheel's. They turn over. They are warm from the cotton and they shake very slightly, the way they always do.

You lift your eyes to the buzzing light and say, quietly, "Okay. Hello, Adrián."

Then the question, already there, as it always is: how long.