Gabriel Almaraz

Jesse Trumbull's thumb is on the trackpad, and the cursor sits over the button for as long as it takes the build to fail a second time. It is the middle of a Tuesday in Small-town Ohio. The office hums, and somebody two desks over is eating something with vinegar in it. He has been Jesse for less than a minute. I know this because the coffee in his mug is still too hot to drink, and I have not yet found out what he does for a living beyond the red text on the screen. I could not tell you what is wrong with him. The stubble itches. The scar through the eyebrow pulls when I frown. He is a fine body, light and a little soft, and he is boring me already, and I do not say that aloud even to myself. I click.

The engine drops a note and catches.

Heat first, and the shake of the handlebar up through both wrists. Noise through the earmuffs, flattened, like being inside a drum. Grass is flying against my shins in wet flecks. One earmuff is pushed off my left ear and the world pours in on that side: a bird, a dog two yards over, a truck on the road. My hands are on the bar. I did not put them there, and they are already holding on, knuckles forward, thumbs tucked. I am halfway down a lawn.

I pull the earmuff back over my ear. I do not hurry. The row beside me is crooked, a drunk's row, and the mower wants to follow it. I lean, and the next pass goes dead straight.

Then the shirt gives him up. It is gray and wet through between the shoulder blades, and the cotton is soft from a hundred washes. The morning comes up out of it in his feeling and not mine: the closet door he opens slowly so it will not wake her, and her breath in the dark room, slow and warm. He pulls the shirt over his head. Then the shorts, the khaki ones with the frayed pocket she keeps meaning to sew, one leg at a time, standing on one foot, and the boots laced at the edge of the bed. Afterward comes the quiet of a house with the coffee already going. The wedding band is on his left hand and I feel it turn when I grip, a small cool weight he stopped noticing years ago.

The handle is rubber and cracked at the end, and it gives me the garage. Someone's father stood with him there once and showed him how to set the choke, patient and unsmiling. Then a Sunday, a church parking lot, a folding table of casseroles, and the sense of being known there, of belonging to the place like a hymn. Then the desk. A corner office and a door that is never his to open, and a phone against his ear, and a voice saying *I'll let him know*. Ten years of letting someone know. The tiredness of it settles into his shoulders, and under it is a pride I cannot find the bottom of: the lawn, the rent paid, his name on a mailbox.

The earth under his boots is hot and slightly soft. My calves are tight, my back is strong, and the left knee has a small complaint it has stopped bothering to voice. His lungs take the humid air easily. He is thirty-one and has a body that works. Under it all, faint, comes a girl from before, a laugh in a car with the windows down, and a grief too old to have an edge. It surfaces and goes under again.

I let go of the bar. The engine dies down to an idle and the blades spin out. I turn my hands over in the light. The ring catches the sun. The palms are rough, with a clipping stuck in the crease.

I look up and the lawn goes on, a street and a fence and a white garage.

"Okay," I say, and his voice is lower than I expected. "Okay, Gabriel."

The mower ticks as it cools. Somewhere a screen door bangs. I wonder how long this one will hold, and whether the wanting will come back by dinner, or by the next pass.