Curt Hendershot

You are Rafael Quiñones for less than a minute and already it is wrong. The hazel eyes in the bathroom mirror are fine. The dimples are fine. It is the client's bed you are standing beside, a woman's pill organizer, a dead husband's cardigan she wants folded a certain way, and you thought: I could be anyone. You are twenty-six, with knees that don't complain, and the whole morning smells of bleach and her tea. A man gave you this body and the first thing you did was wash a stranger's dishes. So you go back to the page with the wheel, and you pay, and your thumb is already moving.

Then the glass room. You are standing, bent a little at the waist, one finger on a page of bar charts, and a leather folio is clamped under your left arm. The rhythm of his hand broke a half second ago, you feel it in the tendon, a wrong tap, and then you tap again, slowly, correctly. Ten more, each one checked. Nobody has needed him to check in years.

Six-one. The weight lands in your heels first, then the shoulders, wide and thick under the wool. Your breath is shallow and tastes of menthol over something sour, last night's whiskey sitting behind the teeth. A pack a day lives in the top of the chest like a folded towel. Your head aches in one clean line above the left eye.

The folio is warm where it presses his ribs. Leather, cracked at the corner. A flash, not yours: his daughter, nine maybe, drawing a cartoon on the inside flap in ballpoint, and him letting her, laughing, the dimples pulling deep. He feels pride so plain it embarrasses him.

The shirt cuff against your wrist. Pale blue, starched at the collar. The morning comes sleeve by sleeve: the left arm first because it is always the left, his thick fingers fighting the small button, the bathroom fan rattling, a cigarette burning on the sink edge, his own eyes in the mirror avoiding themselves. The tie he knots without looking, over and under, a motion older than the job. He pats the pocket for the pack and finds it, and hates that he checked. The jacket last, shrugged over the shoulders, a good suit bought for a job he is afraid of losing.

The shoes press your arches. Floor-wood, hard under the soles, and through it something else: a diner across the street, closed now, where he took the woman who got away every Sunday after Mass, her hand cold in his, powdered sugar on her sleeve. He drives past it daily. The ache arrives whole and sits beside the hangover, and neither of them is yours.

The charts behind you are his quarter, red where they should be blue. The debt under it is a weight he carries in the jaw. Two kids, a girlfriend who says his name carefully. A rosary in the glove box he has not touched in a year.

You lift your hand off the page. Big knuckles, calluses where no one would expect them on a sales manager, nicotine faint in the nail beds. You turn it over. It does what you tell it.

You look up, and you say, softly, in a voice that is deeper than any you've worn, "Well. Hello, Ohio."

How long will he hold? The wanting has not come back yet. It always does.