Efraín Leonel Barrera

You are twenty, six-six, and it is a Tuesday afternoon in Dallas, and you are standing in a kitchen that belongs to someone's aunt, holding a glass of water you don't want.

Seven days and two hours. The ceiling fan clicks. Tyler Kessler's knees have been hitting the underside of every table in Texas, and you have learned that people tell tall boys everything, to the shelf, to the favor, to the heavy thing. A woman at the gas station asked you to reach a case of water and then called you honey. It was nothing. It was the kind of day that makes the wheel look like a window.

Nobody has asked you to leave. That's the trouble. He was easy: soft hair, a nice laugh, a gap year with nothing in it. You wore him like a clean shirt, and this afternoon you caught yourself in the dark of the microwave door and felt nothing, not even boredom. Only the page waiting in the other room with its wheel, and the smaller thing under it that you don't say aloud.

You put the glass down. You spin.

Heat, thick as a wet towel. You are mid-step on a sidewalk, and then you are not stepping. Your right hand is closed around something hard and plastic, and a thin cord runs from it down to a gray dog with its face in a hedge. The hedge smells green and bitter. The dog is sniffing, working a spot on the leaves. Then it looks up, ears pinned back, and stares at you with its whole body.

The leash goes slack. You wind it twice around the hand and start walking, and the dog has to hurry to learn you.

Then the body starts giving you things.

The hoodie first. The cuffs are worn soft, and the zipper pull is cold on your chest. A morning comes up through the cotton: Efraín in the dark kitchen pulling it off the chair, because the shop is cold before the sun comes up, Marisol asleep, a bowl of cereal eaten standing. He zipped it halfway and thought about nothing. The hand on the leash is thick across the knuckles and knows this handle. It remembers Saturday, his daughter shrieking as the retractable ran out and the dog bolted for a squirrel, and him laughing so hard he forgot to hit the brake.

The ring on your left hand is warm. When you press your thumb to it, you get the night he bought it, the pawnshop glass, the number in his account smaller than he wanted, and then Marisol's face in a church parking lot, so young, saying yes in Spanish first. He was sure of one thing then. He is not sure of it now. There is a bottle behind the water heater in the garage. The weight of him is the weight of years of it, a soft ache under the ribs and a tongue that tastes of last night. You get his shame as a flat, practiced thing, the way you'd get a limp.

The boots are steel-toed and heavy. Through them comes the shop floor, the lathe turning, bright steel curling down around his ankles, the smell of cutting oil and hot metal. He is good. His hands can feel a thousandth of an inch before the caliper says it. A young man at work calls him maestro, and he pretends to hate it. That pride is the cleanest thing in him.

There are two kids, a rosary in the truck's visor, a little money tucked away that he never lets himself look at. Mass on Sundays, back pew, hungover. Your lower back burns when you take the curb. The beard itches. Your scalp feels the air.

You stop walking. You lift the hand with the ring and turn it over. It is broad, square, a nick across one knuckle. It is somebody's, and now it is yours.

The dog watches you. You look up.

"Okay," you say, low, in a voice that sits deep in your chest. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."