Esteban Rivas Moreno

Callan's knees hurt, and I know it is the freight, not the years. Ten hours and fifty-seven minutes in him, and I stand in his kitchen in the dark with the refrigerator humming. His roommate sleeps down the hall. I have been lifting pallets for a man who is twenty-two and cannot feel it yet. The freckles on his forearms are pretty under the stove light. I don't care. The body works. Something else is wrong. Around midnight I opened his phone and found a voicemail from his mother, forty seconds long, and I didn't play it. I held it with his thumb over the screen until the screen went dark. She was asking about Sunday. She knows his voice, and she would have known mine. That is all. I don't say it aloud. I open the page with the wheel and pay, and his heart is going hard in his chest as I spin.

Dark road. Both hands on a wheel at ten and two, and the dash glow lies green along my knuckles. The car has drifted a foot toward the line. I pull it back in one smooth stroke, and my hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider, because I want them there. The turn signal ticks on for an exit that isn't his. Three miles from home, and I am taking the wrong one on purpose. I am heavier than Callan, softer through the middle, and my back is warm against a seat that has taken the shape of someone else's spine.

The wheel is leather gone smooth, worn pale at the top. Under my palms it gives me a morning. A girl of six or seven kneels on a bench, tapping a middle C, and I, he, feel the pride rise: listen, listen to that, she's found the note. His daughter. Then the seat belt crosses my chest, and I get a church basement, folding chairs, a hymn in four parts, and him standing with a hymnal held open, singing the tenor line because nobody else will. He believes it. I can feel that he believes it, quietly, the way a man believes a floor.

The jacket sleeve rasps on my wrist. It comes with a morning: the closet, the dark of five a.m., the tug of this jacket off a hook. His wife is asleep with her back to him. He stands in the hall buttoning the plaid shirt wrong, then right, one cold button at a time, the way he has done every working day for years. The cuffs of the shirt are soft with washing. His wife washed them. He doesn't think it. He just knows it, in the shirt.

I lift my right hand off the wheel and it goes to my face. Stubble, the rasp of it under my fingers, the jaw, the lip. I didn't tell it to. It's his, a habit older than the marriage. My hand knows where the itch is. A ring touches my cheek, cold metal, and I get her: not his wife. A different woman on a pier in the wind, laughing, her hair across her mouth. He let her go. He never told anyone how badly, and it sits under his ribs like a stone he carries without noticing. It isn't mine. It is a heavy thing to be handed.

There is a tuning lever in the cup holder. My fingers find the handle of it without looking, and a parlor opens: a grand with its lid up, a string drawn slowly to pitch, the tiny beat between two notes fading until it is one note. The quiet in him then is the best he has. I have never been so still in anyone.

My knees are thick, my breath is short, there is a little money put away, and nobody home who knows I am not him. The signal ticks. The exit comes up out of the dark.

I take my right hand off the wheel and turn it over. Wide palm, ring, the pads of the fingers gone hard from steel strings. I look up into the mirror at hazel eyes and say, "Well. Hello, Esteban." How long, I wonder. Until I want something again.