Adrian Villarreal

You are standing in a kitchen in Coastal Maine, in Marcus Pennywell's socks, and the laptop is open to the page with the wheel on it. The house ticks. The fridge hums. His wife's breathing comes down the hall, and you have to stop yourself from calling it his wife's, because it is not yours either.

You wanted a reason and you have one, and you will not say it out loud. This afternoon at the dock you lifted a pallet of frozen haddock and your back, his back, said a quiet no. It was nothing, a tightening. But under it you felt the long road of this body, the forty-one years and the slow tally of bills and knees. You thought: I could be twenty. You thought it the way a man thinks of water. The dimples ache in your face when you swallow. Nobody has asked you to leave, and you have been him for less than a minute, which is not long enough to owe anyone anything. You press the key.

Wet pavement. The curb is not where your foot expected it, and the street tips. You stumble off the edge and your palm slaps the cold roof of a parked car, and the whole weight of a different body lands in you at once: heavier at the middle, lower to the ground, warm with something sour and sweet in the blood. Your left shoe scuffs once on the asphalt, and you pull it quiet. A streetlight buzzes. Shutters, a closed phone shop, the smell of rain on hot concrete that has not finished being hot. Houston, you think, from the air itself, thick as a washcloth.

The hoodie comes first. Cotton gone soft at the cuffs, and your thumb finds a hole in the left one and goes through it. He put it on this morning, in a rush, one arm and then the other, because the library opened early and the sleeves were stiff from the dryer. The drawstring is chewed flat at the ends, and you feel his habit of putting it in his teeth when a problem will not give. Then the white undershirt, damp against the small of your back. A girl's hands pulled it straight at his waist once, laughing, and the laughing is warm in your chest and not yours: Daniela, her name arrives inside his mouth like a mint. You hold still and let her stay.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. In the right pocket your fingers close on a ring, a thin plain band, and they turn it over, and over, and over, before you know you are doing it. It is his grandfather's. A kitchen, a plastic tablecloth, a man with a rosary wound through his knuckles saying the names of the saints as if calling roll. The ring was too big then. He wore it on a string until he was seventeen. The cross and praying hands on his chest itch with the sweat, and you feel the afternoon he got them, bravely stupid, a hundred and forty dollars he had saved from a summer of stocking shelves, and his mother not speaking to him for three days and then crossing herself over the sink and touching the spot.

The backpack straps bite his shoulders. Inside, the laptop's corner presses your spine, and you know the lawn behind the library, the grass pricking through his jeans, the essay due on Thursday that he has half written. He is the first one in the family to be here. The money is a bare thing, a debt and a number that does not move. He vapes a little with friends, mostly to have something to do with his mouth. Tonight there was a party, a cousin's thing, and he drank more than a few-times-a-year man should. He is ashamed of it already, in advance, and that shame is the cleanest thing in him.

The body underneath: five-seven, soft in the belly, strong in the thighs from walking everywhere. Your head is smooth under the air, and your fingers go to the thin patchy beard and find the gaps, and it is his small private grief that it has not come in. Your feet are sore. Your stomach turns once, and settles.

At the corner you turn left. It is not his way home. His body leans toward the other turn like a dog on a lead, and you let it pull, and you go anyway.

You take your hand out of the pocket. The ring is bright between the finger and thumb. You turn the hand over, the knuckles broad, a faint pulse in the wrist, and lift your eyes to the dark street.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is lower and softer than you expected. "Okay, Adrian."

It holds. It holds as long as you do, and you do not know how long that is. The wanting is quiet now, asleep somewhere under the ribs, and you keep turning the ring, wondering when it wakes.