Ernesto Valdivia

You leave Raymond Sedillo the way you leave a house with the stove still warm. He is sixty-five, and his knees file a complaint every time you stand. The gray in his hair is the only thing about him that has ever surprised you. You are in his kitchen in El Paso before the light, and the coffee is made. The laptop is open to the page with the wheel, and his thumb, a retiree's thumb, thick at the knuckle, is hovering over the button. He has been him for less than a minute, and already you know what's wrong. He has nowhere to be. Nothing in him is hungry. His pension arrives on the third, and his daughter calls on Sundays. You want a man who is in the middle of something, and you press.

The wheel gives you a kitchen in the dark.

You are standing up, and your weight is on your left hip against the counter. The glass is cold and bright under your thumb, and a price sits on it that is bigger than a month's rent. Your thumb lifts and stays lifted. Then your hand sets the phone face-down on the counter, and the screen goes out. The kitchen is the color of a held breath. There's a refrigerator humming beside you and a dish rack, and a window gives back nothing but black with a small yellow lamp in it.

Then the body comes up through the floor. It is short, and the ground is close. There's a belly that sits forward like a bag carried in front, and a back that has been bent over car seats and hotel chairs for thirty years. The leg is already bouncing. You didn't tell it to, and when you try to stop it, it only goes underground and shivers.

The hoodie is soft at the cuffs. You close your hand on the sleeve, and he comes.

It's morning, and he's standing at the foot of the bed in the dark so he won't wake her. He picks the navy jacket off the chair. The shoulders are a little tight now, and he knows it and buttons it anyway. He knots the lanyard around his neck without looking, as one does a thing done two thousand times. The badge says a hotel's name and a conference, and under it his own, which you can't read. He feels a small shame in the jacket, the particular shame of a man in a good suit that is not quite a good fit. He is also proud. He has stood in lobbies for twenty-six years and sold people what they didn't know they needed, and he is good at it. Two hundred, three hundred thousand a year, and the house is paid down. Still a watch in a glass case makes him feel eleven years old.

Your thumb finds the ring. It's plain gold and a little loose in winter. Under it a night opens. She is asleep with her back to him and her hair across the pillow, and three children are breathing down the hall in three rooms, one of them snoring like her grandfather. He stands in the doorway listening to all of it. He has never told anyone that this is why he can't sleep. He is afraid of how much there is to lose, and he counts it in the dark. The rosary hangs on the lamp, and he doesn't pray, only touches it going by, like a man touching a doorframe.

You press your tongue to your teeth. The jaw is smooth, and he shaved it yesterday. He has carried a crooked nose since a stairwell at nineteen, and a doctor in a hurry set it. Your finger finds the bend, and with it the cigarette he quit eleven years ago. Your mouth wants it, and there's the old flat taste of wanting.

The slippers are cheap and worn through at the heel. They hold a hundred midnights of exactly this, standing here, looking at what he'll never buy, and putting the phone down.

You lift your hands into the dark window. They are brown and short-fingered, with a band on the left one. You turn them over. They are warm. The leg bounces. Somewhere down the hall a child coughs once in sleep, and you hold still for it.

You look up at your own reflection, at the crooked nose and the hazel eyes. "Ernesto," you say, and the voice is low and rough, and it fits.

Beneath it the wheel is already quiet, and you wait to feel whether you want anything.