Alonso Vargas

You leave Declan Mahoney's body in the cab of a reefer truck. It is parked at a weigh station off the Turnpike, and you have been him for less than a minute. His knees are already complaining about the seat. His thumbs are sore from the phone. The unibrow keeps pulling down toward his nose, and you can feel it do that. He is twenty-four and he is fine. He works. But he has a pull in him like a dog on a leash, and the first thing you learned about him is that he cannot sit still inside a quiet, and you wanted quiet. You paid, and the wheel turned.

The light changes first, and it is a tube humming overhead. You are crouched, with your weight on the balls of your feet and your knees bent hard, and there is a sock in your right hand. Warm air is coming out of the open dryer onto your face. The sock is heavy with heat, and its heel is worn thin to a gray shine.

Your left hand is on the dryer door. Two fingers are missing from it. The thumb and first finger hold the door steady, and the rest is a smooth knuckled edge that does not feel like loss, just like the way the hand is.

The sock opens something. A kitchen, and a girl of nine at a table, cross because he has put the wrong cereal in front of her. He feels guilty and amused at once, and he is tired in a way that has no bottom. Then it is gone.

The flannel on your back is soft at the elbows. It gives you the morning in pieces. His thick fingers did the buttons from the bottom up, because that is how his father did them. He stopped at the cuff, where the left one has to be pushed through with the heel of the hand. His wife was still asleep, or pretending to be, and he did not wake her. Then the jeans, with the belt worn to one hole. Then the shoes by the stairs.

His knees hurt. He is fifty-eight and he knows to rise slowly. His back has a tight, familiar band across it, and his shoulders are stronger than you expected, built from years at the fry station. He has spent years lifting baskets out of the oil and watching them rise.

The concrete floor is cold through the soles. It carries a different memory, of a night with the lights off down here and a phone held cupped in his palm, and a woman's voice, and the thing he never said to anyone. It is shame and tenderness together, and the smell of detergent. The ring on your left hand turns when you flex it, a plain band worn thin. It brings back a church basement and a coffee urn, and a hymn he has never once sung loud. It also brings back the number he does not look at, the one that is so far underwater it has stopped being a number.

You pull the load out. It is warm and it smells like him, and you drop it in the basket. Your hands start folding before you decide anything. The corners are squared and the creases are sharp, and the sleeves tuck in fast. This is the one thing in his house done exactly right.

You stop. You hold your hand up in the humming light and turn it over. Three fingers and a thumb, and you close them slowly.

You look up and say, quietly, "Well. Hello, Alonso."

The tube hums over you. You do not know how long he lasts.