Ernesto Villaseñor

You are standing in Oliver Benstead's kitchen with the tap running over a mug you have already washed. It is the hour when the base empties out and the light goes the colour of weak tea. Twenty-one years old, and his knees do not know anything yet. Two days and two hours in him, and you have stopped being surprised by how easily he moves. That is the trouble. Nothing in him resists you, and there is nothing in him you cannot do. You ran the length of the flight line this morning and your lungs asked for nothing. You looked at the girl in the canteen, and she looked back, and you felt only that it was arranged for you. Nobody here has ever told you no. You go to the laptop and the page is already open, the wheel sitting there with its small patient edge. You pay. You do not say goodbye to the hazel eyes in the dark window over the sink.

It turns.

The spoon is moving. Your hand is moving it, in a circle, and the circle stops. You start it again the other way, because the first way was not yours. Heat comes up off the pan against your face. Meat, onion, a little oil catching. The floor is cool and slightly tacky through the soles of old shoes. Your weight sits low and wide, pulled forward over the belly, and your feet are planted a short man's distance apart. Your back is warm. There is sweat under the shirt. You pinch salt from the dish and scatter it, and you do not taste it. You reach up for a second plate and set it down next to the first one, and you do not know why you did.

The shirt comes first. Cotton, soft from washing, the little woven squares, short sleeves that stop at the meat of the arm. The cuff rubs, and you get a morning: a closet door, a hand taking the shirt off a hanger, thumb working the buttons from the bottom because the top ones are always stubborn. Then the jeans, the belt pulled to the third hole, a small private bargain. Then the shoes, brown, the left lace knotted twice because it keeps coming loose. Under all of it a feeling that is not yours: the day is only a day, and he is steady.

The spoon handle is smooth wood, worn pale where his thumb sits. It gives you a table. Two children, one tall and impatient, one small and picking out the onions. A woman across from him laughing with her whole face, and then the same woman in a doorway holding a box, saying his name quietly, Ernesto, as if setting it down. The ache of that is old and well kept. He has been setting a second plate out for years, by accident, by habit, and some nights he leaves it there.

Your free hand rises and touches your cheek, high up, where the mole is. A tic. Under the fingertip, the little raised dark of it. A bench comes with it, a machine half-assembled, a caliper closing on a part and reading true to the thousandth. Pride, plain and quiet, no one to show it to. The money in the bank is a small warm fact he never spends on himself. A sober year, then more of them, kept like a pilot light. His grandmother's saints on a shelf in a back room, a candle he lights without announcing it to anyone.

The body underneath: the lower back complaining mildly, the right knee stiff, the wide steady hands that know the pan better than you do. You are short here. The counter comes up high. The beard is a faint rasp under your fingers.

You lift the hand from your face and turn it over. A pale band circles the ring finger where a ring lived for years. You press your thumb into it.

You look up, toward nothing, toward whoever is watching, and you say, in a voice lower and slower than any you have owned, "Dinner for two, then."

The pan hisses. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be standing here when the plates are cold.