Ernesto Maldonado

You are leaving Caleb Sutter because of the beard.

Not the beard exactly. You are sitting in his kitchen chair in small-town Ohio, midday, a Tuesday, and you have been him for less than a minute. You lift a hand to scratch your jaw and the beard is wet with the coffee you have not noticed spilling. Five-foot-five. Blue eyes. Thirty-two. A body that works. But the mug is in your hand and the thing you wanted was never a body that works. The wanting is back, hot and stupid, like an itch under a cast. You have been wanting since before the first spin. You thumb the page open. The wheel is already turning, and you do not decide so much as stop deciding not to.

Then you are walking.

You are mid-stride on boards that give a little under you, a porch, with dusk going blue over a ridge of mountains. Your arms are up in front of your chest, both hands cupped and talking to nobody. A sentence is half out of your mouth. The first motion is wrong: the left hand goes to a gesture the right has already finished, and you correct it, slowly, the way you would correct a signature. Then again. Then again, ten times, each checked, though nothing here has needed checking in years.

The vest comes first. It pulls across a belly that is soft and heavy and entirely settled, and the wool under your fingers brings the morning up. His morning, his hands. Buttoning from the bottom, the third button always stubborn. His wife, Lucía, behind him at the mirror, saying the blue shirt, not the white, the white makes you look like a man who is sorry. He rolled the sleeves twice, to the forearm, because rolled sleeves tell a room you came to work. The silver hoop in his left ear: she gave him that at forty, and he wore it into a boardroom to dare someone to mention it. No one did. He has been a little disappointed ever since.

Your thumbnail finds the side of your other thumb and picks at the cuticle. You did not tell it to. It knows this the way it knows its own name. A raw spot, tender, a habit older than the money. Under it, the ghost of cigarettes: the hollow where the pack used to ride in the shirt pocket, nine years quit, and the hand still goes looking at three in the afternoon.

The ring is warm and snug on the finger. You turn it with your thumb and get a kitchen, a first one, the ex-wife laughing at a stove. Then a long hallway, a hospital, two children, one small and furious, one silent. His chest tightens with a love so plain you almost apologize for having it. You did not earn this. It is not yours. It is lit from inside anyway.

The glasses hooked in the vest pocket tick against the button. The watch is cool on the wrist. The shoes are good leather, a little tight at the left little toe. His knees complain when you shift, a dull, honest ache, sixty years of Denver stairs. His breath is slow and wide. Under the smell of pine and cut grass there is the faint Catholic cold of candle wax, a Sunday that clings to the cloth. A rosary lives somewhere in these pockets. You do not look for it.

You stop walking. The speech he was rehearsing is gone, and you will never know who it was for. Nobody comes out to the porch.

You raise your hands and look at them. Broad, freckled across the backs, the wedding band, the cuticle bleeding a pinprick. You turn them over. Then you lift your eyes, and you say, in a voice lower than any you have worn:

"Well. Hello, Ernesto."

The mountains do not answer. Somewhere behind the glass a phone begins to ring, and you wonder, with the whole weight of him settling on your shoulders, whether you will still be standing here when it stops.