Gordon Pruitt

You are leaving Mateo Ruelas because of a pallet jack. It sat in the aisle at the end of his shift and you could not make his hands do what you wanted with it. They knew it, the forearms and the hip, the whole habit of the man, and you were only riding along. Three minutes in him, and you stood at the machine with the evening going orange through the high windows and felt the wanting come back, the way it does. The goatee itched. His brown eyes kept finding the beauty mark in every dark window. And under it was Dale, whom you wore for twelve minutes ten days ago and who has a best friend you never got to be. You remember that man's number in Dale's phone. You remember Dale not calling it. So you open the page with the wheel and you pay, and it turns.

The hold music loops back to its first bar. His shoulder drops the phone into your hand, and you are standing at a kitchen counter with a pen that has stopped on the second digit of a number and does not start again.

Your weight settles low, a belly that sits forward and a spine that has opinions. The beard is a warm weight on your jaw. The unibrow pulls down when you frown, and you are frowning.

The envelope is under your left hand. The ring touches the counter, a small cold click against laminate, and it opens something: a church basement with folding chairs, no, a courthouse hallway, and he is not religious, he only wanted it done properly. A woman in a green dress laughing at his tie. The ring was too big and she had it sized before the weekend. It is the best afternoon he owns, and it comes to you as warmth in the chest, his, not yours.

The shirt is blue flannel gone soft at the cuffs. Your fingers find the second button and the morning arrives through them. Four-thirty in the dark, the house quiet, three kids' shoes piled at the door. He buttoned it standing over the bed so he would not wake her, left sleeve first because the right shoulder aches. It does ache now, a hot wire from the neck down into the shoulder blade, thirty years of lifting things. He pulled on the brown work pants stiff with paint and drywall mud. The belt is cracked at the fourth hole. His hands knew the hole.

Sawdust is in the pocket of the pants, fine as flour. You rub it between finger and thumb and get a framed-out house, bare studs, light coming through them in bars, and a younger man yelling at him over a saw. He remembers a bid he lost to a cheaper crew. Under that is another thing, small and private: a woman in a Vegas parking garage years ago, a different life nearly. He does not think of her often, but he thinks of her, and he has never told his wife. It is not guilt exactly. It is a door he leaves unlocked and never opens.

The phone is warm and the music starts again. Your thumb, which knows nothing, hovers over the screen.

You lift your hand and turn it over. Thick fingers, a pale band of skin under the gold, a callus at the base of the thumb. Then you look up, toward the window, and say, "Hello?" to the empty kitchen, in a voice lower than any you have had. Somewhere a kid's cartoon is playing. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, or if it already has.