Ernesto Calderón Fuentes

Manuel Ortega Beltrán's thumbs are tired of the other man's steering wheel. That is the first thing, standing in a Chicago kitchen with a cold coffee and a full beard I keep touching as if it might explain itself. Forty years old, five-eight, a back that has learned the shape of a cab seat. He has been mine for less than a minute. In that time I have learned that his knees hurt on stairs and that the beauty mark by his eye itches when he lies. I have not learned what I wanted from him. That is the trouble. He works, he is solid, he is fine, and I stand in his kitchen at the end of his Monday and want something I cannot name. So I open the page with the wheel on it, and my thumb, his thumb, is already moving.

The wheel clicks and the kitchen stops.

Dark. A road, flat and wide, humming under me. My hands are at ten and two, and the dash glow lies on my knuckles like cold milk. The car has drifted a foot toward the line. I pull it back in one smooth stroke, and both hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider, not the way he held it. I do not know the exit. The turn signal is ticking anyway, a small green arrow telling me to leave a road that is not mine.

Everything is lower. I sit lower in the seat, I am lighter, narrower in the shoulder. My feet reach the pedals with the knees bent more than I expect. My own breath comes shorter and quicker, a smaller chest working.

The steering wheel is leather, worn smooth at ten and two, and it opens something. A boy's hands, a borrowed sedan, his father's voice from the passenger seat saying, *Suave, mijo, suave.* Gentle. He learned to drive gently, and he has never once been cut off without letting the other man go ahead. Under the pride is a stubbornness I recognize, a man who decided young that nobody would ever see him hurry.

The watch is heavy on the left wrist, steel, cool against the bone. A flash: a hotel conference room, his name read off a card, the first time anyone said *chief* in front of his title. He bought the watch that week and has never taken it off in front of anyone. The ring sits under it, thin, plain, warm. His wife's laugh in a kitchen with the radio on, flour on her forearm, a long Sunday. Twenty years of Sundays, then the Sundays before her, with the other woman, the first wife, and the way he still sends the birthday text to her every year on the right day. Two children. One of them asleep in the back seat once, a hot Houston night, and him driving ten miles under the limit so as not to wake her.

The shirt is thin cotton against my back, a black polo, and it gives me this morning. His hands fastening the cuff buttons one by one, left then right, the ring catching on the thread. The hair brushed back off the high forehead and tied at the nape with two fingers, grown long because his father's brothers went bald and proud. He skipped shaving. Three days, gray, the stubble rasping under my knuckle now when I rub my jaw. He stood a moment at the closet and picked the vest, then took it off again for the drive. He prays in the car. I feel the rosary he keeps in the cup holder before I touch it, and the last cigarette he ever smoked, eleven years ago, behind a church hall, shaking.

My heart is steady. His lungs are clear, and it has cost him something to keep them that way.

The signal ticks. I look at my hands on the wheel, turn them over in the dash glow, the ring, the dark hair on the backs of the fingers, the small, capable palms. Then I look up into the mirror at brown eyes that are not mine.

"Okay," I say, in a voice lower than his face looks. "Hello, Ernesto."

The exit sign comes up green and strange. I wonder whether you are still here tomorrow, how long before I want again.