Ernesto Padilla

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The exit sign buzzes red above the doorframe, and the dust is still coming down like a held breath finally let go, and you flex his fingers one at a time because they don't feel like they should.

You know the shape of this only after: 4 a.m., a service corridor, concrete and cigarette smoke ground into the walls, a badge clipped to a lanyard that reads a name you'll learn to answer to. He'd been walking to a shift he doesn't do, in a building he doesn't own, and something underground had decided otherwise. He'd braced in the doorway the way people are taught to. Now he's yours, freckles and bleach-blond roots and all, and somewhere in this city there's a wife who is about to get a phone call from a man who sounds like her husband but isn't.

You find the wallet first. Ernesto Padilla. Pharmacist. There's a photo tucked behind the license — him, a woman with her hair pulled back laughing at something out of frame, two kids stacked on a porch step like they're posing for a school picture that got interrupted by joy. You put the wallet back like it's something that could bruise.

The week moves the way weeks do when you're wearing someone else's ordinary. You go to the pharmacy because not going raises questions you don't want raised. You stand at the counter with the wall of amber bottles behind you, the afternoon light coming in low and gold through the front window, and you count pills into little cups because his hands, it turns out, already know how, even if you don't. Customers call you by his name. An old woman asks about her blood pressure medication and you find the answer sitting right there behind Ernesto's eyes, waiting, like he left it out for you.

At home there's a wife who touches your — his — arm at the sink and says something about her sister's car, and you say something back that seems to satisfy her, and you feel like a man walking through a house with his shoes still on. There are two kids who want to be thrown in the air, who don't yet understand weight the way adults do, who scream with a joy that has no caution in it. You throw them anyway. Your arms — his arms, this ordinary untrained body — ache by the second night.

The tattoo on the arm is a face you don't recognize, someone rendered too lovingly to be a stranger. You catch yourself looking at it in the bathroom mirror some mornings, like it might explain itself if you're patient. It never does. The wedding band is tight going over the knuckle, tighter than it should be, like the hand grew into it years ago and never let go.

You think, twice, about what it would cost to keep this — the porch, the kids' weight in your arms, the amber bottles, the freckles you now recognize before you see them, like they're a word you've learned. You think about it in the parking garage of the casino where his real shift, the one you're covering out of some obligation you don't fully understand, starts and ends in darkness.

On the last morning the ground doesn't shake. Nothing announces it. You're standing at the pharmacy counter, afternoon coming in low, a woman's photo taped under the register that you've started calling by name in your head, and then you're not there at all, and the hands go back to being his, and somewhere close by he opens his eyes not knowing what doorway he's bracing in now, or why his palms ache like he's been carrying something heavy for a very long time.