Frank Dellacroce

You are standing in Victor Armijo's kitchen before the light, and his knees ache on the cold tile. The coffee is bitter and you have drunk half of it. He has been yours for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong with him. He is fine. He is warm and sturdy and kind to himself in the mirror, and none of it is worth anything to you. Something in you keeps reaching past him for the next thing, and you cannot say what it is, even here, even alone. You set the mug down. The phone is already open to the wheel.

You press it. The desert goes out.

Now you are standing with your weight on the left leg, and your hands are moving through paper. A manila folder is under your right palm, and a stack of others sits against your hip. The room is bright and flat. A phone hums somewhere, and rain-colored light comes through glass. Your hands lift a folder, square it and set it down, and you botch it. The edge catches. You do it again slowly and correctly, and then ten more, each one checked, though these hands have not needed checking in years.

The belt is the first thing that opens him. Leather worn soft at the third hole, cool where the buckle presses your belly. It gives you a morning: a hallway, his wife's voice from the bedroom, *you're wearing the brown ones again*, and the small, stubborn pleasure of saying yes, they're comfortable. Her name comes up with it, Donna, and with it comes a long, ordinary tenderness, thirty years of it, like a chair you stop noticing.

The polo is navy and has been washed into softness. It pulls at your stomach and hangs off your shoulders, skinny-fat, a body that stopped trying. It gives you the buttoning, his thumbs pressing the two buttons through, and the cuff of the sleeve against a forearm gone thin. Then his daughter's text lights up in memory: *Dad, call me?* He did not call. He meant to. The not-calling sits in his chest like a swallowed stone, and for a second it is yours.

The ring is warm and a little tight on the knuckle. Underneath it is the other woman, the first wife, a kitchen years ago and a silence he still apologizes to in his sleep.

The lanyard card knocks against your thigh. It gives you the job: twenty-six years of other people's mistakes, the glass office, the door he keeps open so they will talk to him. The soles of his shoes are worn flat, and your lower back is a hot wire. The chin you cannot see is a thing you feel anyway, a dent he has run his thumb along while thinking.

You lift your hands off the paper and look at them. They are freckled and veined, with the ring on the left. You turn them over, palms up, and they are steady.

You look up and say, quietly, "Okay, Frank."

Somewhere under the quiet is the question of how long, and you do not know.