Ernesto Villalobos Tapia

Rafael's hands are on the keyboard, and they are good hands. They know the soldering-iron tilt and the way to hold a probe. The office in Boston has the late-morning hum of a floor full of people being useful. His coffee has gone cold beside a circuit diagram he has been reading for forty minutes without understanding it. You understand it fine. That is the trouble. He was a man who could do things, and you were a man being asked to.

You gave him less than a minute. The beauty mark, the six feet, the way strangers' eyes slid off him: none of it was wrong. It just fit like a coat that someone else had been warm in. You open the page. The wheel is already turning, and you pay.

Then there is no office. It is the dark, and the dark is warm.

Your breath is ragged, wet against fabric, and in one pull it evens out. The arm that was hanging off the mattress is dragging itself up, heavy as a wet rope, and the body rolls onto its back. Your hands fold at your chest. You know without being told that he has never slept this way. Streetlight cuts a white line through the curtains, and the ceiling is a color you cannot name yet.

His memories come only through what he touches.

The sheet under your fingers is cotton, worn thin, and it gives you a night: a woman's laugh in this same bed, her cold feet on his calf, and the old joke that he sleeps like a man who has been shot. It lands as tenderness, and it is his, not yours. The T-shirt against your ribs is soft from a hundred washes. It gives you the drawer it lives in, and a son's voice, grown now, saying *Dad, that shirt is a rag*, and the pride he felt at being teased by someone who had his jaw.

The wedding band is warm against your own palm. You turn it with your thumb, and you get a church, the smell of wax and wet wool, and his mother crying in the second pew. You get the Hail Mary he still says at red lights without noticing. Under the pillow your knuckles find something small and metal. A lighter. Your thumb flips the lid open and shut, click and click, before you have decided anything, and you feel a thousand idle hours in the motion. He never smoked. He just needed something to do with his hands while managers talked at him, and then while he became one, in a glass office with the door always open so no one would think he was hiding.

You get the morning he put on the clothes he wears to work: the polo, the khakis, the badge on its clip. Sleeve by sleeve, his arms went through, and he stood at the mirror and was satisfied and did not know why. You get the long amber light on a snowmobile under a blue tarp behind the house, and the plywood he never finished. The drink or two each evening is in there too, a warm and easy loop. His body is fifty-five years of knees that have opinions and a back that remembers every winter, and underneath it a strength that has never once been tested by anything cruel. Your heart is slow and sure. The room smells of cold air and laundry.

Boston is already far away. Rafael is a card now, a thing you own.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. They are broad and brown, and the band catches the glow. You turn them over slowly, palm and then back, and the lighter's click is still in your thumb.

You look up and say, to the dark, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

You do not know if that is a promise or a question, or whose.