Ernesto Balderas

You are Marlon Etheridge for less than a minute — fifty years old, a scar through the eyebrow, a Dallas apartment gone quiet around a laptop screen with the wheel still spinning on it from your last visit — and already the wanting has come back, because that is what it does, it never actually leaves, it just goes and sits somewhere in the ribs and waits for you to be alone again. It is the middle of the night. Everyone in this life is asleep, including, technically, him — Marlon, the body, whose actual dreams you are borrowing the way you borrow everything. You tell yourself it's boredom, that a fifty-year-old man's knees ache in ways you're tired of, that a student's overdue library fines are not a problem you want to keep solving. That's true enough to say out loud. The truer thing is smaller and uglier: you like the drop. The half-second before the number lands. Nine hundred and thirty-one times and it has not gotten old, only quieter, like a habit you've stopped explaining to yourself. You open the page. You pay. You spin.

The kitchen light is a single bulb over a stove, and you are standing under it mid-decision, a phone warm and face-up in your hand, thumb an inch off the glass where it stopped. The price on the screen is four figures for something with a strap. Your — his — chest is doing the small tight thing chests do when a number is bad news dressed as an idea. You feel the weight of him settle into you all at once: shorter than Marlon, heavier through the middle in a soft unremarkable way, beard against your jaw thicker than the moustache you just left. The house around you is one room wide. You can feel that in the air itself — a shotgun house holds its breath differently than an apartment does. Somewhere outside, steam is still coming up off a wet street from a rain that's already stopped.

The phone goes face-down on the counter. That's not your decision — that's the last of him finishing a thought before you're all that's left to finish anything. Your hand doesn't pick it back up. It just sits there on the wood, and touching that counter is the first thing that opens.

The wood is scarred pale in one long stripe where a knife's gone off a cutting board too many times — his mother's board, before it was his — and touching it gives you a Thanksgiving, eleven people in a room built for four, someone's kid asleep on a pile of coats in the front room because there's nowhere else to put her. Warmth, mostly. A little grief folded into the warmth, because his mother isn't the one who made the stuffing this year, hasn't been for three years, and he stood right here doing it the way she taught him with the sage crushed between his fingers first to wake it up.

The shirt against your back — long-sleeve, worn to softness — gives you this morning, or what would have been this morning if this were day: his hands pulling it over his head in a room with the shade still down, sleeve by sleeve, unhurried, because there was nowhere to be. He doesn't open the store for hours yet. He runs turned around, has for a year — nights loading trucks and doing recovery walks after close because the district manager likes the aisles rebuilt before the sun's up on the pallets, and Ernesto stopped fighting the schedule around the time he stopped fighting most things. The sweatpants came on after, gray, gone soft at the knee, and there's a memory in the elastic waist of him laughing once, alone, at how much they look like giving up.

The watch on the screen isn't the point and you know that now, the way he knew it — it's the girlfriend's birthday next month and he wants, badly, uselessly, to be a man who buys something that isn't practical, just once, and watches her face do the thing it does. Underneath that, quieter, an ex who is not this girlfriend — a woman who used to sit on this counter swinging her feet while he cooked, who left in a way that wasn't a fight so much as a long slow correction, and who he still, at odd hours, misdials before he catches himself. Both women are in the room with you for a second, the way people are in a room when you're only thinking about them.

His body carries its own report separately from all that: lower back tender on the left from pallets, a callus map across both palms that predates this job and will outlast it, forty-three years sitting in the knees as a low hum rather than a complaint yet. His right thumbnail is bitten down past where it should be — an old, mindless habit, the kind that happens to a man while he's doing math about rent in his head. Catholic in the unspecific way of a man who goes at Christmas and crosses himself in his car before a hard conversation. Not much of a drinker. Never smoked, not once, watched a father do it long enough to skip it entirely. Twenty-some thousand dollars sitting in an account he doesn't check often, put there the slow way, dollar over dollar, which is exactly why a watch with four figures on it can stop a man's thumb an inch off the glass.

You look down. The hand on the counter is his — broad, blunt-nailed on four fingers and bitten raw on the thumb, a callus riding the base of the first knuckle where a box cutter sits all shift. You turn it over once, like it might answer to a different hand under it, and it doesn't, because there isn't one.

You lift your eyes to nothing in particular — a dark window, your own reflection ghosted faint in it — and you say, out loud, to no one awake to hear it:

"Okay. Let's see what you cost me."