Eduardo Cisneros

Wade Hollister's knees are bad in the morning light of a Tuesday afternoon, and that is the first thing you think of when you think of leaving him. Thirty-four, and the left knee already clicks on the porch steps. You have spent less than a minute in him. In that minute you stood in his kitchen in Dallas, in his socks, and watched the sun lie across a table that belonged to someone else's mother. His hazel eyes in the toaster's side. His blond forearms. You opened his phone and it knew his thumb. And you felt the same thing you have felt a thousand and some times, which is that a man you have just put on is a coat with someone else's name sewn in the collar, and you already know how it ends: you are bored by the hour. No. That is not it. Something in the fridge, a note in a woman's handwriting, *call Dad back*, and the sudden hot knowledge that nobody was going to call him back, that it was you now, that you would have to be sorry in his voice. You shut the fridge. You went to the screen. The wheel is already turning under your finger before you have decided anything, and the farmer's hands, his big pale hands, let go of the mouse.

The hedge.

That is all there is at first. Green, close, a smell of cut leaf and warm dust. Your weight comes down through two boots into concrete, and your arm is out at the end of something taut that goes slack as you arrive. The dog has looked up. Ears back, one eye showing white, a small wiry animal the color of a doormat, and it knows. Dogs do. Your hand, his hand, is closed on a plastic handle that is warm from being held.

You wind the cord twice around your palm. You step. The dog has to learn the stride.

The flannel is first. It sits across your shoulders, soft at the elbows, and the cuffs are buttoned, and the buttoning comes up out of the cloth like a hand on your own. He did them in the dark. Not the dark of night: the dark of a hallway, the bedroom door pulled to so as not to wake her, a woman's breathing, the ceiling fan ticking. Left cuff, right cuff, the wedding band catching on a button, and a small thought that is not yours, *te quiero, mujer, duérmete*, the tenderness of a man who works with his back and is gentle with the rest. You did not ask for that. It goes through you anyway and out the other side.

Your thumb finds the underside of the leash handle, where the plastic is worn smooth in a dent exactly the size of a thumb. Another year opens. A girl, six or seven, her hair in two braids, shrieking with delight at the end of this same leash, a smaller dog, a different dog, the one before, and him running behind her with his arms out. Her name arrives. You do not take it. It is hers. The feeling stays: a pride so heavy it is nearly fear.

The jeans are stiff at the thighs. They have been washed in the sink, you know it by the way they hold the shape of wringing. Under the denim the legs are thin, hard, the legs of a man who walks a loading dock all day with sixty pounds in his arms. Five foot seven. You feel how near the ground you are. Your lower back hums with the dull steady ache of a lifetime of boxes, lift and turn, lift and turn, and he has learned to live inside that ache as one lives beside a highway. In the warehouse, the trailer doors yawn white with the glare of El Paso, and a supervisor you do not like calls him *Eddie* in a voice that is a little too friendly. That memory has no words, only the clench of his jaw.

You bring your free hand up to your mouth without deciding to. Your teeth are at the thumbnail. It is already bitten to the quick, and the habit tastes of salt and old cardboard. So that is what these hands do when nobody is asking them anything.

Stubble under the knuckle. The ring in the nostril, a cold little tick against your breathing. The studs in both ears. A younger man, a bad year, a cousin with a needle and a bottle of mezcal, laughing, and then later a wife, the first one, saying *you look ridiculous*, and the leaving. He kept the rings. He keeps a lot, and pays for little of it, and what is in the bank would not cover a bad month. You get that as a pinch behind the breastbone, a number you cannot quite read.

A medal, under the shirt, against the skin: a flat coin of metal with a saint on it. His mother's. Sundays. The cool pulse of it settles you, and for a second you almost say a prayer in a language you were not born with.

The dog pulls. The sidewalk goes on. White light comes down on a street that is not quite his street.

You stop. You turn the hand over. The brown of it, the scrubbed knuckles, the gold band, the ragged thumb. You lift your eyes, and the dog is watching you as if from a long way off.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected, with gravel in it. "Okay, Eduardo. Let's see how long you last."

The leash hums out under your palm, and somewhere behind your ribs the wanting is already folded small, waiting.