Efraín Maldonado

You are standing in a warehouse aisle in Atlanta, forty-two years old, with a scar through your eyebrow that you keep touching. Dwayne Pruitt has been yours for less than a minute and already his shoulders ache from a shift you have not worked. The scanner on his hip chirps. Nothing is wrong with him. He is strong and he works. That is the trouble. Every pick is a pick. You think of the wheel the way you think of a door left open in another room, and the draft finds you. So you pay. You spin.

The worksheet lands wrong. Your hand puts it down a quarter-turn off, the corner against the wood, and something in the arm knows at once that this is not how it goes. You lift it. You set it again, slowly, square to the table's curve. Then the next, and the next, each one checked, as though ten thousand mornings had not been enough.

Rain on tall windows. A brownstone stoop across the street, wet brick. Your back is bent over a kidney-shaped table, and your spine reports it: fifty-nine years, a low ache above the belt, a belly soft over thin legs. You straighten. Your hair falls forward, long, heavy as a rope, and you push it back with a wrist that does it without asking.

The lanyard swings against the polo. The cotton is thin from washing, and it gives you the morning: a closet in the dark, the black shirt taken off its hanger first, then the khakis with the crease he never irons out. He sits on the bed's edge to lace the boots, and he thinks of his daughter's voice on the phone last night, saying *Papi, eat something*. He thinks of the girlfriend, Marisol, who says his hair makes him look like a retired prophet, and he is pleased every time.

The paper in your hand is cheap and warm from the copier. A flash: a hallway, a boy of five who would not let go of his sleeve on the first day, and him kneeling, knees cracking, saying *I am not going anywhere, mijo.* Pride, plain as bread.

Something rolls in your mouth. A toothpick, worn soft. Your tongue knows it. Under it, the ghost of pipe smoke, cherry tobacco, the porch at dusk, the one hour that is only his. Rosary beads in a coat pocket you are not wearing; Sunday Mass, the pew's cold wood. No drink in him ever. He is proud of that, quietly. A little money put away, in a savings account that he checks the way other men touch a pocket.

Your nose is wrong, slightly. When you breathe, one side whistles. A memory of a fist, a long time ago, and a doctor pressing it back crooked and saying *good enough*.

You turn your hands over. They are brown, thick at the knuckle, calloused at the pads. They are not Dwayne's. They are very good at gentleness.

You look up, and say, low, to the empty little chairs: "Okay. Okay, Efraín."

You wonder how long this one lasts, and whether you will wake as him.