Bryce Talamantes

The pipe wrench is still warm from his grip when he balances the coin on his thumb.

Bryce does this without thinking, the way some men crack their knuckles. A peso, worn smooth, an old habit from his abuelo who taught him to call it before it left his hand, not after. Heads, the leak is the trap. Tails, it's the wall behind it. A stupid little ritual he does under every sink in this city, kneeling in the smell of old pipe grease and jacaranda drifting in through the courtyard door.

He flips it.

I come in on the turn — on the small bright nothing between his thumb and the ceiling — and by the time the coin lands flat on the back of his hand, I already know which side is up. That's the part nobody would believe if I tried to explain it. You don't see the coin land. You just already know, the way you know your own name, except the name isn't mine.

His knees ache first. Nineteen years old and already his knees ache, and I feel it like a message left for me specifically: *this is what he's spent on this floor.* The overalls are stiff with dried grime at the thighs. The earring is a small cold weight I keep noticing, the way you notice a hangnail, over and over, uselessly.

I don't lift my palm right away. I let him — let it, let this hand — sit there a second, coin pressed to skin, while the light comes through the window at that low gold morning angle that makes the chipped tile look almost gentle. Petals from the tree outside have blown in across the bathroom threshold, purple going brown at the edges.

There's a girl's voicemail still open on the phone in his breast pocket. I don't listen to it. I know, somehow, the way I know the coin, that she called last night and he didn't call back, and that there's an older voicemail beneath it, from a different girl, years cold, that he has never deleted. I let both of those things sit where they are. Not mine to spend.

I lift my palm.

Tails. The wall, not the trap. He — I — already knew.

I finish the job anyway, because his hands know the wrench better than I know anything, and it would be a waste, wouldn't it, to have a body that knows a thing and not let it. I turn the fitting. Water stops. Somewhere above me a woman I've never met thanks me in Spanish I don't have to search for, because it isn't search, it's just there, sitting in the muscle of his jaw and tongue, and I use it like borrowing a coat that fits.

Outside, the courtyard is going white with heat by noon. I sit on the low wall a while, turning the coin over in fingers that aren't mine, watching petals gather in the gutter drain I didn't clean and won't.

By the time evening comes down blue over the rooftops, I am tired in a way that isn't mine either — a nineteen-year-old tired, day-labor tired — and I understand, without being told, that this is as long as I get: one turn of a coin, one day of a stranger's hands doing a stranger's work, and then whatever was already going to happen to him, happens, and I am not there to see if he calls her back.

I set the coin on the courtyard wall, heads up, for no reason I can defend.

Then I let go of the hand that was never mine to keep.