Emilio Restrepo

The griddle is still hissing when the decision comes to you whole, the way it always does — not a thought so much as a weight shifting.

Ray Cisneros's hands are good hands, better than the last set you wore, and that is the trouble with them. Thirty seconds ago you flipped four eggs without looking, wrist doing the work while your eyes stayed on the door, and something in you went flat and cold at how easy it was. Eighty-seven bodies and this is what gets you: not pain, not tragedy, just a Tuesday-grade competence that will still be there tomorrow and the day after, world without end. The manager is yelling about ticket times. The fryer oil needs changing. Ray's feet ache in a specific, familiar way that isn't even bad enough to complain about, and that's worse somehow — a life exactly as uncomfortable as it needs to be to keep going and never any more interesting than that.

You wipe Ray's hands on Ray's apron, walk into the walk-in freezer where nobody will see, and take out the phone that isn't strictly allowed on shift. The wheel loads slow on the bad signal. You spin it anyway, because there is always a next one, and because standing still in a body has never once been the thing you wanted.

—

You are on your knees.

Not Ray's knees — smaller ones, tighter, a carpet burn feeling at the caps though nothing has actually burned them. Your palms are pressed together loose, not gripped, the grip of a man who stopped meaning the gesture two sentences ago. A clock on the nightstand says 2:0-something in red. There was a smile a second ago; you can still feel where it was, the ghost of it in the cheeks, cooling.

Then, without your say, the knees come back down. The forehead goes to the bedspread. A breath goes out through the nose, involuntary, like something settling.

—

The bedspread against the forehead smells like fabric softener and, faintly, like a dog that hasn't lived here in years — and that's the first thing that comes, a golden retriever named Peso, gone eight winters now, and grief that isn't yours passing through like weather.

The t-shirt is what really opens him. Navy, soft from wash after wash, and the second your — his — shoulders roll against it you get the whole morning: standing in front of the closet at five-forty, scrubs already laid out on the chair for later, choosing this shirt instead of the gray one because Marisol likes him in the navy, though she was still asleep and wouldn't see him leave. His hands did the sleeves without him watching them, the same way they thread a needle at 6x magnification without a tremor when it counts — steady in exactly the place he needs them steady, and nowhere else. Ask Emilio Restrepo to speak up in a departmental meeting and his voice will catch and stutter like a boy's; put a fourteen-blade in his fingers and he has never once shaken.

The wedding band is next, small and dumb and total — twelve years, a courthouse in July because the church wedding fell through on money, Marisol laughing about it now more than she minded it then. Three kids, a fourth almost, lost early, never spoken of outside this room. The earring, a hoop he got at nineteen against his mother's wishes and has never taken out since, not even for surgery, taped over instead — a small stupid loyalty to a version of himself that existed before residency ate every other version.

And under all of it, further back, an ex-girlfriend's name sitting in him like a low note that never fully resolved — Camila, sophomore year of med school, the one he sometimes still measures things against without meaning to, not because he wants her back but because some door in him just never closed all the way. He does not think of her often. He is thinking of her now, this second, on his knees, which is why the prayer went the way it did — half a bargain, half apology, said too fast to a God he isn't sure is listening, about a case tomorrow he doesn't trust his hands on, about being tired in a way three children and a marriage he loves doesn't cure.

The carpet under the knees. The bedspread cool then warm under the forehead. The body itself: thirty-five and already going soft in the middle in the way of men who stopped playing anything competitive at twenty-eight, the hairline retreating at both temples like tide going out and never coming back, a mustache he keeps because Marisol asked him once, years ago, to try it and never told him to shave it off. Nothing hurts. Nothing is wrong with him. That is, somehow, the whole prayer: nothing is wrong, and still.

He got to the amen early. He was already half up, weight shifting into his heels, the smile starting — the private, faintly embarrassed smile of a man caught being sincere by no one — when something underneath the smile simply stopped being pushed from behind it.

—

You come back down the rest of the way onto the bedspread, forehead against cotton, and lift your head.

Emilio's hands are in front of your face where he left them, loosely folded, a plain band catching the lamp. You turn one over slow, the way you always do, watching fingers that have opened a chest cavity today and will again tomorrow, wondering with real curiosity whether they'll stutter now that someone else is behind them.

You look up into the clock's red light, then past it, into whatever is watching.

"Amen," you say, and it comes out steadier than his own voice usually does.