Ernesto Quintanilla

You are in Wyatt Kerrigan's boots, at the fence line, and the cold is coming up through the soles. He has been yours for a minute. The cattle are lowing somewhere in the gray, and you have already learned what you can't do. You can't make the knees stop wanting to rest. You can't make the heifer in the chute hold still. You have his rancher's hands, and they know the rope better than you ever will, and every time you reach for something, the hands go ahead of you and you're a passenger in your own wanting. That's the whole reason. The body works. It just doesn't need you. You open the page with the wheel on it, and your thumb is red and chapped and certain, and you pay.

Then you are standing, mid-motion, with paper under your fingers.

A classroom, full light slanting through tall windows, the air warm and chalky. A sheaf of pages is lifting between your thumb and the stack, and your weight is on the left leg, and the breath goes out of you slowly, as if it had been waiting. Something in the rhythm of the hand is wrong. You turn the page too fast and it skids. You do it again, slow, and it lies flat. The next ten you check, each one, though some part of him says this has not needed checking in years.

The lanyard swings against your chest, and the keys on it touch the button of the shirt. Memory comes up through them: a ring of brass, a door that sticks, a hallway at six-fifteen, the particular pride of being first in the building. Thirty-one years of opening this door. Not yours. His feeling, warm and a little stubborn.

The shirt is cotton, soft from washing, and it clings at the belly and the back where the day has made it damp. Sleeve by sleeve it gives you the morning: his left arm first, always, then the right, the cuffs buttoned at the kitchen counter in the dark while the coffee ticked. He doesn't drink anything stronger than that, never has. A rosary sits in the dish by the keys. He touched it on the way out, a habit like a nod. Then the tan band on his ring finger, pale as a healed thing. The thumb goes looking for a ring that isn't there, and it finds the lighter in his pocket instead. He has never smoked. He flips it anyway, open, shut, open, and the click is a whole life of waiting rooms and parent conferences and a divorce lawyer's lobby. The flint wheel under your thumb brings a woman's laugh, recent, a kitchen that was almost his, and then the quiet after she left. It aches in a place under the sternum, low and bruised.

Three children, grown, a photograph on the desk edge: a graduation, a gown too big, his daughter squinting. You touch the frame, and pride comes up so hard your eyes sting. The desk is steel and wood under your hip. The knees are sixty-three. The back says sit, and the hands say keep going, and he has money now, more than he ever expected, in a house in a subdivision with a pickup in the drive, and none of it was why he was here at all. He stayed for the children who learn late.

You lift your hand and turn it over. Broad, brown, the pale ring of skin, the knuckles thick. A teacher's hand, chalk in the creases. Nobody's but yours, now.

You look up, through the windows, at the bright flat morning, and you say, in his low voice, with the gray moustache moving over it, "All right. Let's see how long this one holds."

The lighter clicks shut in your pocket. You don't know whether the wanting comes back by noon.