Ernesto Armando Baeza

You are standing in a kitchen in Pittsburgh, in the last of the light, and you have been Stephen Morimoto for less than a minute. His knees ache on the linoleum. His freckled forearm lies on the counter next to a mug of tea he has just made and not tasted. The window over the sink shows a neighbor's wet garage roof. You had a body that worked. You are not leaving because it failed.

You are leaving because, when you reached to open the drawer by the stove, his hand went to the wrong drawer first, and you felt his dead wife's habit in the muscle. A teaspoon, a folded dish towel, a rubber band. Nothing you wanted. A man's whole life is a drawer you can only open by accident. You stand there with that small wrongness in your fingers, and the wheel is already open in your head, and you press.

The floor goes out of the kitchen and comes back as concrete.

Noise first: air hissing, a conveyor ticking along its rail. Then the weight. It is low and forward and wide, a belly that sits out in front of you like a held tray, and a spine that has learned to lean against it. Your right hand is closed around something that shudders. Your left rests flat on cold stamped metal. A door panel hangs in front of you, gray-beige, one fastener short of finished. White desert light comes through the open bay behind you, and your eyes are not on your hands, because his never are.

One motion goes wrong. The drill bites crooked, the bit skates, and you stop. You do it again, slowly, seat it, and squeeze. The trigger answers like a word he has said ten thousand times. Then ten more, and you check each one with a thumb, because you do not know what the job has already forgiven.

The shirt comes first. Navy cotton, a little stiff at the collar, a long-sleeved gray thermal under it pushed to the elbows. The cloth against your back is damp and it gives you a morning: his hands doing the buttons from the bottom up because his late mother did it that way, the shirt off a hook, the gray sleeves pulled on in a dark bathroom so as not to wake the house. The belt next, the black leather he has worn to a soft crease at the fourth hole. Then the work pants, brown, gone shiny at the thigh. They remember the chain-link gate at home, the turquoise paint flaking on the carport post, and a dog that is not there.

The drill handle is warm and its grip is slick with years of him. It gives you a younger man on the same line, thirty years back, learning to keep his wrists loose. A foreman said, *you don't fight the gun, mijo, you walk it.* Pride, in his chest, like a coin.

Your left ring finger is bare, and under your thumb the skin there is a shade paler, a groove where something used to sit. It opens a kitchen, a different one, voices rising, and the quiet after a door. Two children's names press at the back of his throat, and you do not say them. You feel only that he loves them badly and completely, and that he lifts his phone every night and sets it down.

His nose throbs faintly. It was broken once, set a little crooked, and a breath through it whistles very slightly on the left. The glasses sit on it. His knees ache, his lower back is a warm hard band, and his forearms are strong in a way he never thinks about. The boots hold the floor like roots. Somewhere in him is a rosary he does not carry, a drink or two at dusk, and money put away by a man who never spends it.

You lift your hand off the panel. You turn it over. Pale band, thick fingers, grease in the creases. Then you look up into the light.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is lower than you expected, "hello."

The line keeps moving. The next door is already coming down. You wonder whether this one lasts until the shift horn, or until tonight, or tomorrow.