Álvaro Nieves

The nail gun sits heavy in your hand and you hate it, tonight, with a specificity that surprises you. Small-town Ohio, quarter to six, the light going long and orange across a job site that isn't even yours — you're subbing a deck rebuild for a guy who underbid himself into the ground. Your knees ache the particular ache of fifty-three years and four flights of stairs today. You have been this man less than a minute, technically, since the last time you looked, and already you know you don't want the rest of the minutes. That's how it goes. The wanting doesn't build, it just arrives, complete, like weather. You set the nail gun on the sawhorse. You wipe your hands on jeans that aren't yours and were never going to be. Somewhere in your pocket, on a phone that also isn't yours, the site is already loaded, because you never really closed it, because six hundred and five men in you don't let a tab die. You spin.

The rope is rough hemp under both palms and it is dusk and it is not dusk — it is evening on the other side of the day, a Wednesday folding into itself twice. The bell is still swinging off the strike, the sound holding a half-second too long in the cold air, and your breath is going up in front of your face like a small ghost. Your knees don't ache. Your knees are fine. There is a coat zipped to your chin and stone steps behind you, empty, going up into a blue nothing, and your hands — his hands — are already coming together for the second clap before you understand they are hands at all. You bow. You mean to come up on the beat, the way the body wants to, muscle ahead of mind, but something in you holds the bow down an extra count, low, held, and then you rise level and exact, and nobody watching would have seen anything but a man finishing his prayer correctly.

The zipper is the first thing. Cold metal tab under your chin, and it opens a morning — his hand pulling this same coat off a hook by the door of a rental apartment three blocks from here, condensation on the window, a woman's voice from the bedroom asking if he packed his gloves, and him saying yes, mentiroso, lying, because the gloves are still on the dresser at home in Atlanta and he does not want to go back for them. Cynthia. Her name comes up whole, unbidden, the way his memories do, not given but leaking through whatever he's touching. Thirty-one years married to her. He proposed with more nerve than money, back when the company was four employees and a lease he could barely make, and she said yes before he finished the sentence, and he has never once, not one single year, regretted asking.

The rope again, under both palms, calloused in a way that surprises you — not a workman's calluses, but the small hard patches of a man who plays golf badly and grips too hard, who irons his own shirts on Sunday nights because it settles him, who once helped pour a concrete patio at his son's first house and thought about it fondly for a decade after. Diego. The name comes with a photograph feeling, not an image exactly but the texture of one: a boy, then a young man in a cap and gown, then a grown man clapping his father on the shoulder in a boardroom that Álvaro built out of nothing and handed him half of. Diego runs the west coast offices now. Álvaro flies out to see him more than the job requires and tells Cynthia it's business.

Under your feet, stone worn smooth by other feet, other bells, other wishes — and it opens something older, something from before the money, before the blue hair even, which came from a bet with Diego two Christmases ago that Álvaro would never actually do it, and did, and Cynthia laughed so hard she had to sit down, and it stayed because he liked, at sixty-five, still being able to surprise the people who thought they had him fully cataloged. He built a company out of a garage and a fax machine and thirty years later he stands in corner offices at dusk with a city on fire with light behind the glass and still sometimes doesn't believe the elevator will take him up that far. He is Catholic the unglamorous way — mass most Sundays, a rosary in the glovebox he doesn't use enough, and a private superstitious tenderness for bells, for wishes, for small rituals that cost nothing and might, somehow, matter. He is here because a business trip put him near a shrine his guide mentioned in passing, and he made them stop the car.

His shoulders carry sixty-five years without complaint — thick through the middle, dad-bod solid, a smooth clean-shaven jaw he ran a razor over this morning in a hotel bathroom mirror, steam still on the glass, thinking about nothing, thinking about the wish he was going to make before he even knew what it would be. The wedding band on the left hand is warm from his own skin, not yours, not yet. His green eyes, when you find them in the reflection of the brass bell, are a stranger's eyes wearing an old man's patience.

You look down at the hands on the rope. Thick fingers, faded blue hair falling in that blunt fringe across your eyeball line, breath still fogging.

"Gracias," you say, to no one, to the bell, to the empty steps — and you don't know yet if you mean it as him or as the six hundred and sixth thing you have decided, quietly, greedily, to be for a while.