Declan Boudreaux

Gabriel Ocampo has been mine for one minute, and already I am tired of his mustache.

It is not the mustache. It is the engineering plant in Eastern Kentucky, the morning light on the gravel lot, and the way his hands, my hands, know a torque wrench better than they know me. I came up out of the wheel into him a minute ago and the first thing I did was reach for a coffee that was not there. Something in his body was braced for a bad meeting. The dimples were no help. Nothing is wrong with him. I just stood in the lot, felt how completely he was finished, and my thumb was already on the page.

It's a plain thing, wanting. It comes back like hunger.

The wheel turns. Gabriel stops.

Now there is steam coming off wet concrete and a clipboard under my left thumb. The key ring is a cold weight against my thigh. The courtyard is green and dripping, and I am halfway through a motion. My right hand is lifting a page. My eyes are on the paper, not the hand. The rhythm breaks for half a second: the hand does the wrong thing, then slows and does it right. Ten more motions follow, each one checked, on a job that has not needed checking in years.

The clipboard's edge is worn smooth where his palm lives. It gives me a flash, not mine: a Saturday, a small girl on his shoulders in the Quarter, her sticky fingers in his curls, and a pride so large in his chest that it hurt. A daughter. The ache of it is entirely his.

The polo is cotton, damp at the collar, tight across the shoulders. It hands me the morning: his wife's back to him in the dim bedroom, the hanger scraping, the navy shirt pulled over his head, left sleeve first because it always is, then the khakis with the dirt ground permanently into the knees. He stood a moment in the shotgun house's narrow hall, room after room in a line, hearing his daughter's cartoons at the far end, and buttoned the placket while thinking about a unit with a leaking tap.

The keys. I close my fist on them and a whole afternoon comes up: a vacant unit, a smell of old paint, a tenant weeping in a doorway over a deposit, and him, patient, ashamed of being the one who had to say no. He prays about days like that, quietly, in the truck, the way his church taught him. He has not had a drink in four years. His hand goes to his shirt pocket for a cigarette that has not been there for six.

The ring on my left hand is thin and warm. I turn it with my thumb and feel her laugh, a particular one, from the kitchen, over something he said.

His body is thirty-one and mostly fine. A low ache sits in the small of his back, and his knees are stiff from squatting by water heaters. His fingers lace themselves together and push, and the knuckles crack on their own, without my asking. The habit was waiting for me.

I look at his hands. The wrong one is mine now. I turn it over, palm up, in the green light, and lift my eyes.

"Hello, Declan," I say, in his voice, softly. "Let's see how long."