Connor Yeager

Hilario's knees hurt on the stairs. That is the first thing, and it is most of why I am doing this. I am standing in the hardware aisle of a store I did not choose, in a body that is fifty-three and five-three and sorry for itself, and a man at the end of the aisle is holding up a box of hinges and asking me which kind. I do not know which kind. The scar through Hilario's eyebrow itches when he is asked a question he should know. Forty minutes of his life have been mine and I have learned a ledger, a bad hip, and a way of clearing his throat before he lies. The sun through the front window is the flat white of mid-morning. I am tired of the weight of him. I have the phone out before I decide to.

The wheel turns. The hinges, the man, the aisle go out like a hand over a lamp.

The spoon is already moving. Wood in my fingers, a pan under it, something thick turning against the bottom. I am mid-circle and I stop. The heat comes up the handle and into the heel of my palm. Then I start again the other way, because the first way was not mine. Steam on my chin, on a short beard I can feel with the skin of my face before I know it is there. The kitchen smells of onion gone soft, and under it the pan's metal.

I reach for the salt and the pinch goes in without my asking. I do not taste. My hand wants to go to my face and I let it, thumb along the jaw, the beard dry and neat.

Then the shirt. A long-sleeved thing, soft and thin at the elbows, and the cotton pulls across the shoulder when I lift my arm, and it gives me a morning: a hand pulling it off a hook on the back of a door, the cuff turned inside out and put right, a thumb pushing through the sleeve. He chose it because the other shirt was in the wash. The jeans are stiff at the knee and loose at the thigh, and they give me a belt hole he punched himself with a nail, standing on a bathroom floor, pleased with himself for fixing it.

The floor is cold tile through the socks. The counter's edge is cool across my hip. I reach up for the second plate and the cupboard knob is smooth and worn on one side. My arm knows exactly how high to go. A girl's laugh comes through the knob, from some other room and some other year, her feet on his feet in a hallway. It is warm and slightly drunk and he was happy. Not mine. I take the plate down and set it beside the first, and the two rims click.

He is twenty-four. His back does not hurt. When I breathe, nothing catches. There is a faint old taste of smoke at the back of the tongue, a habit he put down years ago and still reaches for when he is nervous. The tattoos are lines on the forearms, fine as pencil, and I see them without having them explained. The body is strong and a little small and entirely at ease.

I lift my hand off the spoon and turn it over. Clean nails, a pale line where a ring would not be. Ink running up the wrist. I keep looking until the fingers are only fingers, and then I look up, at nothing, at the window and the light.

"Well," I say, in a voice that is higher and lighter than the last one. "Hello, you."

The pan ticks on the burner. I do not know how long this one lasts, or whether the wanting is already waking somewhere under his ribs.