Efrén Guzmán

The commission lands at 4:58 on a Friday, and Mark Alvear's phone buzzes on the seat of the truck with a number so good it feels like a joke somebody else is going to laugh at. Forty-one thousand on a deal you closed with a coin flip's worth of actual skill, the kind that makes your chest feel like a struck bell. You feel it in his shoulders, wide and easy, in the dimples that show up in the rearview when he grins at himself for no reason a stranger would understand. This body has been kind to you. It has been effortless in ways you noticed and didn't say out loud — good knees, good hair, a face people trust before he's said a word. But the thing about a body that works is that it stops being an event. You've had him seventy, eighty days now, you've lost count, and today there's nothing left to feel except the number on the phone, and the number, big as it is, isn't a feeling. It's just information. You already know before you've admitted it that you're going to pull over into the lot behind the taquería, thumb open the site, and spin, because the alternative is sitting still inside a good thing and calling that enough. It has never once been enough.

The wheel turns the way it always turns, colors bleeding into a blur that means nothing, and then it stops on a face you've never seen, and there's no drumroll, no travel, no in-between — you are simply behind it.

The razor is already moving. Not stopping, not starting — it's mid-stroke, up the grain of a jaw with foam gone thin and grayish at the collar of it, and your hand — his hand — doesn't hitch at the corner of the mouth where you can already feel, distantly, that it usually does. It just keeps going, fast, sure, finishing the second half of the face quicker than the first half was done, and some current under your feeling notices the wrongness of that before you have words for why. The bathroom is small and warm and ordinary. A tiled sink not much wider than the two hands gripping its edges. A toothbrush standing alone in a metal cup. The mirror throwing back a face you don't know yet: silver hair combed thin across a spotted scalp, a mustache going gray, one eye — you catch it in the glass — sitting very slightly wrong, drifting outward like it's watching something past your shoulder that isn't there.

The razor touches the sink with a small metal sound and that's when it starts coming in.

The undershirt against your back first — thin cotton, soft from washing, and it opens onto a woman's hands ironing shirts on a fold-out board in a kitchen with the radio on low, a woman with her hair up who used to be the girl he married thirty-four years ago in a church that doesn't stand anymore, torn down for a parking structure sometime in the nineties, and something in your chest — his chest — goes tender and useless the way it always does thinking about her, Marisol, who is right now four rooms away running water for coffee and doesn't know yet that today is a day she'll remember for reasons that have nothing to do with what actually happened. The belt around your waist gives you the shop: a room with two chairs and a mirror running the length of one wall, hair on the tile in dark crescents, a radio playing norteño too low for the customers to complain about, forty years of standing on his feet turned into a permanent list in the lower back, a callus on the right thumb thick as a coin from the same three fingers holding the same clippers since Reagan was president. The jeans at your hip bring back this morning exactly — not another morning, this one — the two-hand tug to get them over a belly that used to be flatter, the button that takes a little wrestling now, the sock that always goes on the left foot first because the right foot has a bad toe from a dropped weight in 1988 and doesn't like to be first at anything. You dressed in this. You are wearing today, still warm from being worn.

The wedding band is cold and then it isn't. It gives you the wedding itself, brief and complete — her in white with her mother crying behind a fan, him sweating through a rented jacket, twenty-eight years old and sure for the first time in his life that he wasn't going to mess this up — and then the two kids arriving years apart, a girl first who's a nurse in Henderson now, a boy after who works the pit at one of the casinos on the Strip, both of them raised on this floor, on this water, on this same tired good city that never sleeps and made sure he never quite did either. None of it plays like memory. It plays like feeling with a date stapled to it — his relief, his pride, his particular tiredness — and none of it is yours, and all of it is arriving anyway, uninvited, through cloth and metal and the smell of drugstore shaving foam going stale in the warm little room.

Under your palm the scalp is thin, warm, familiar to a hand that has run over it ten thousand times without thinking, the low part and the hair combed across it a habit older than either of his kids. Your knees ache faintly in the way of a man who's been on his feet since Carter. This body knows things you don't — where the pressure goes on a straight razor to not open a jaw, how to hold a comb in the last two fingers while the first two do the cutting, the exact angle to lean a customer's head without a word passing between you. You didn't bring any of that skill. You're only standing in it.

You lift both hands out of the water and look at them — thick fingers, a plain gold band catching the bathroom light, a nick of foam still clinging above the wrist — and they are not the hands you had this morning, wide and dimpled and thirty years younger, and for one full second that absence is louder than anything the room has given you.

You look up into the mirror, into that outward-drifting eye looking back at its own reflection like it doesn't fully believe it, and you say, quiet, mostly to no one:

"There you are."