Ernesto Villalobos

You are standing in Darius Colbert's kitchen, and the coffee is going cold in his big, easy hand. This is the best body the wheel has ever given you. It is tall, it is rested, it does what you ask. Four minutes ago you were stuck at the counter with a text from his sister still lit on the phone, *Mom asked if you'd come Sunday*, and you realized that you did not know the name of the dog she meant. You knew the dog's weight, the dog's bad hip. Not the name.

That is all. Nothing went wrong. He was kind to you, the way a house is kind when you are only visiting. You looked at the birthmark in the toaster's chrome and felt nothing at all, so you opened the page with the wheel on it. Your thumb is already coming down.

Then you are standing.

The floor is different first, hard and low under shorter legs, and the weight sits lower in you, thick through the middle, settled. A window is full of green. You are leaning over a desk with your right arm out, and a pen is touching a leather folder, and the next motion is wrong. Your hand sets the pen down crooked on the cover. You pick it up and do it again, slowly, and it lands square. You do it ten more times, each one checked. The man whose hand this is would be surprised at you.

The leather comes first. Under your fingertips it is cracked soft at the corner, and with it comes a flash that is not yours: a woman's voice, *you never just leave anything alone*, and a Christmas, and the folder in its box, and the guilt of being a man who can't sit still. His thumb rubs the edge on its own. You let it.

The blazer comes next, wool across your shoulders, tight under the arms where he has gained weight. You feel him buttoning it this morning in a hallway, the second button, the way he stands in front of the mirror and does not look at his own nose. Broken at nineteen, set crooked by a cousin's friend, never fixed. He liked it. It made him look like a man who had been somewhere.

The shirt is a small blue check, soft from washing. A different morning rises through it: a daughter, grown, calling from three states away, saying *Dad, you sound tired*, and him saying he was fine, standing at this same window. The footbridge hangs out there over the brown creek, green shade dropping down on it, and he walks it at lunch because walking is the closest he gets to stillness. A cigarette used to go with it. Eleven years gone, and his mouth still wants one at the exact middle of the day. You feel the want, and it is not yours, and it is very particular.

Your left hand is rubbing the pale stripe on your ring finger, where a band used to be. Beneath it a memory: the day he took it off, not in anger, in the car, in the parking lot of a Kroger, because it had started to feel like lying. Her name was a soft one. You do not get it. You only get the weight of the ring in his palm.

Your calf itches. The tattoo is there under the trouser cuff, and you know without looking whose face it is. His father's, in black and gray, put on the year the man died, so that he would be walking around on something. Money sits behind it all, quiet and well-managed, two million and change, built by being careful with other people's fear. It has never bought him anything he wanted.

There is a knee that aches on the left, a back that complains when he leans, a heart going steady and slow. The empty client chair waits across the desk, and the charts keep drawing their green line on the screen.

You lift your hand and turn it over. It is square, brown, the nails clean, restless even now, the fingers wanting a task. Then you raise your eyes to the glass, to the stranger's face with its crooked nose.

"Well," you say, in a voice with Kentucky in it. "Hello."

Nobody answers. The hand keeps tapping. Somewhere past the window, the wheel is already waiting, and you wonder how long before you want it, whether it will be today, whether you will still be a man who loved a bridge.