Gregory Sandoval

You are sitting at the edge of a classroom desk that is not yours, in a body that is not yours, twenty-two years old and still humming with somebody else's coffee, and you cannot stop tapping Marco Villanueva's foot against the tile. Seventy-one minutes you have had him. Long enough to grade nothing, teach nothing, learn that his knee pops when he crosses his legs and that he bites the inside of his cheek when he's bored, a habit that isn't yours and that you now can't stop doing either. The lesson plan on the desk is somebody's careful handwriting, arrows and underlines, a man who cared about fractions once. You don't care about fractions. You never will, no matter whose hands you're borrowing. That's the itch — seventy-one minutes of a good, strong, young body and already the room feels like a coat that fits someone else's shoulders. You pull the site up on his phone before you've decided to. The wheel is already spinning in your head before it spins on the screen.

You tap it at 2:14 his time, a Thursday, Dallas light coming in flat and white through classroom blinds, and the number changes to 800 and something in you says *finally*, though nothing has actually happened yet, and then it has.

The van's back doors are open in front of you and your hand is already moving toward a hand truck's handle before you know it is a hand truck, before you know it is a hand at all. There is a package under your other arm, heavier than you expected, and the arm holding it is thick and sun-browned and does not belong to the boy you were a half a second ago. Your knee — his knee — takes the weight of a step down off the truck's lip, and the motion goes wrong, hitches, a stutter in a stride that should be automatic. You catch the handrail instead of the doorframe. Recalibrate. The next ten steps come out slow and deliberate, a man double-checking work his hands have not needed checking on in eleven years. Palm trees stand still and dry in a light that is morning here, though somewhere behind you it was already afternoon in another state, in another skin.

The package's cardboard edge digs into the meat of your forearm and that's the first door: a flash of a thousand boxes, a thousand courtyard buzzers, a route memorized the way scripture gets memorized, through repetition and not through love. Gregory Sandoval has walked this exact stretch of stucco and dead palm frond for six years. The scanner on your belt is warm from the sun and when your finger finds its trigger without you telling it to, you get a fuller thing: mornings starting at four, the diesel cough of the warehouse, a supervisor named Ruiz who used to ride him about scan times until Gregory quietly beat every number on the board for a year straight and never once mentioned it.

The shirt is doing more work than the box. Polyester-cotton, brown, a collar gone soft at the edges from washing — and through it comes the actual morning, hours ago from where you're standing but a lifetime from where you started: an apartment kitchen, a wife named Denise still in her robe, pouring coffee into a thermos that says WORLD'S OKAYEST FISHERMAN because their younger boy thought that was hilarious at fourteen and it stuck. Gregory's shoulders remember bending down for her kiss, the practiced economy of two people who've done this exact goodbye four thousand mornings running. The shirt going on: right arm first, always, an old habit from a shoulder he tore loading a truck a decade back and never quite trusts since, even healed. The rolled sleeves are rolled the same two turns every day, not because it matters, but because a thing done the same way every day is a kind of peace for a man who does not have many other places to put it.

The belt with the scanner on it — the low, practical weight of it at your hip — brings the job whole: the church-quiet of driving alone before the streets wake up, sports radio low, a KJV app he never opens but keeps on his phone anyway, more habit than faith and also somehow exactly faith. The dip tin in his back pocket, worn soft-cornered, gives you a taste at the root of your tongue that isn't there yet but is coming, a phantom of Copenhagen and prayer both, because he chews when the guilt about the drinking gets loud on Sunday, and not otherwise.

The tattoo doesn't need touching to speak; you can feel it on the calf like a brand, cross and praying hands, done at twenty-six the week his first daughter was born, in a shop that smelled like rubbing alcohol and hope. His knees ache faintly, a 47-year-old ache, honest and low, the kind that isn't injury so much as evidence — six years of these steps, six before that of a different route, a body that has been paying rent on itself for a long time and paying on time. He's strong in the way rope is strong: not bulging, just reliably, boringly capable, a man who could carry a couch up three flights and complain about it after, not during.

And the ring. Plain, left hand, warmed by his own pulse before yours arrived to borrow it. Denise. Two kids — a daughter at UC Riverside on a partial scholarship he will not stop bragging about to strangers at the DMV, a son finishing up an associate's degree and living at home, eating like the house is on fire. A big night out with Denise the first and third Saturday of most months, margaritas at the same restaurant, because routine, for Gregory Sandoval, is not a rut. It's the whole architecture of a life he actually likes living.

You are still holding the box. Your — his — arms are steady now, corrected, checked, the ten motions after the stumble all coming out careful and slow the way a man checks a knot he's tied ten thousand times, suddenly unsure why he's checking it.

You look down at the hand on the box. Thick fingers, pale hair bleached by sun, the ring catching the light. You turn it, slow, the way you always do the first minute in a new one, like it might turn out to be a photograph instead of a hand.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to nobody, in a voice two octaves lower than the one you had seventy-one minutes ago, testing the weight of it in your own mouth. "Okay."

You do not know yet how long Gregory Sandoval gets to be a stranger driving his own truck. Neither does he. Neither does anyone.