Gilberto Mendoza

You are standing in Marcus Tillery's kitchen with his apron already over your head, and you cannot make yourself tie it. The register at the Kroger is twenty minutes off. His body is fine. It is twenty-one and quick and nothing in it hurts. That is the trouble. It has been fifty seconds, and the coffee maker is still ticking, and the whole young length of him sits waiting to be used for something. You open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb, and you do not look at why.

Then there is a different floor under you, and it is cold concrete.

Your arms are over your head. A ratchet is in your right hand and its weight is exact. The left hand is flat against a cold, gritty oil pan. Gravel crunches somewhere out past the open bay, and the creek-and-diesel smell is so thick you taste it. The motion you were in the middle of has been wrong for half a second. You feel the wrongness in his shoulder, which is a stranger's shoulder, and you set the socket again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, because you do not trust a hand that is not yours.

The shirt comes first. The cuffs are rolled twice, and the cotton is stiff along the forearms with old grease. Touching the rolled cuff, you get the morning. A kitchen with the light still off. A woman's back at the stove. He buttons the shirt wrong by one and she fixes it without turning around, two fingers at his collar, and he stands there and lets her. A small child asleep upstairs, and he stops outside that door with his boots in his hand, listening to the breathing. Warmth comes up through you that you did not earn.

The rag in the back pocket. You pull it, and it is his father's old undershirt, torn square. Suddenly there is a driveway, a hood propped open, a man's voice saying lefty-loosey, mijo, slowly, slowly, and the shame of being nine and getting it backwards. Then the pride of the day it stopped being backwards.

You run your hand over your scalp. It is tapered short at the back and bristled at the sides, and the motion is not yours. The hand does it by itself. It brings up a church basement, folding chairs, a girl from before the wife who laughed at that gesture and who still sends a card at Christmas. He never told anyone he keeps them in the glovebox. The jaw under your palm is smooth, shaved close at some dark hour so nobody would see him tired. The ring is a thin cold circle on your left hand, and it brings up a savings account of small deposits, and a number he checks on his phone when he can't sleep. There is a rosary in the truck. There is a belly that presses the belt and knees that already know about this concrete. Your thumb finds the scar through the eyebrow, and a bike, a curb, his brother laughing and then not laughing.

Past the bay door, the cable bridge hangs over brown water in the green dark before dawn.

You lower the ratchet. You turn the hand over, wedding band up, the palm black in the creases, and the hand belongs to you. You lift your eyes.

"Well," you say, to nobody, in a voice made of gravel. "Hello, Gilberto."

Somewhere behind the thought is the wheel, and the question of how long until the wanting comes back. Whether you are still him by tomorrow, or by lunch.