Hadi Castellanos

The priest's knees ache. That is how it starts, kneeling on the cold floor of a sacristy in Queens with the burn scar pulling on my forearm like a wet thread. Two minutes in him, and I am already tired of the beard. Of the smell of incense in the wool. Of how he would never, in sixty-two years, have wanted what I want, and how everyone who looks at me expects him to answer. Somebody has come to the door asking for a blessing on a dead man's car. I say wait. I go to the phone with the wheel on it.

I pay. I spin. The wheel gives me a name I know, which is the cruelest part: Ruben Castellanos's brother. I was Ruben for under a minute once, thirty-four days ago, in Nashville, a social worker with a beauty mark. I remember a brother on the phone in his pocket, a voice that said *call me, Ruben, it's been a month*. I never did.

Now.

Cold. Wet iron. A glove in my right hand, the leather stiff with grease, and my hand is already moving, already reaching for the tire, thumb and fingers closing around the valve cap in a motion done ten thousand times. I do it wrong. The cap slips. I do it again slowly, correctly. Then ten more tires in my head, each one checked, each one a job that has not needed checking in years, because something in me does not trust this body yet.

The L rumbles overhead. Steel dust sifts down through the lamp's yellow cage. My knees are bent and the weight sits low and wide in my hips, a heavy man's balance, and my belly presses the flannel against my thighs. My back hurts in one precise place, left of the spine. Good lungs, though. Ex-smoker's lungs, scarred but loyal.

The glove brings him first. A boy of nine in a kitchen, his brother's hand on the back of his neck, steering him away from a fight. Ruben, older, always older. *Hadi, walk away.* The leather smells like the cab, and suddenly it is the cab at four in the morning, a daughter's voice on speaker saying *Baba, you promised*, and he did promise, and he is going to be home by Tuesday.

The flannel on my shoulders gives me the morning. His wife's hands on the buttons, no, his own, but she was watching from the bed. She said the navy suited him. He left the top two open because of the tattoo, the crest he got at twenty-two with his cousins on a night he still laughs about. The sleeves he rolled himself, left first, careful, because the left holds the ring and the ring has a dent from the time a trailer door closed on it.

The jeans give me a girl named Noor. Before his wife. Before everything. A summer, a river, a promise he made out loud and did not keep. He thinks of her once a year and is not ashamed of it, only quiet. He has never drunk. His father drank enough for the whole family. He quit smoking the day his youngest was born and still reaches for his breast pocket when he is afraid.

The cap tightens on my skull. Three children's names rise up like a roll call. The money in the bank, the quiet pride of it, the rig paid off.

I look at my hands. Thick, warm, dark hair across the knuckles. A plain band. They are steady.

I look up and say, to the street, to the lamp, to whoever is listening: "Hadi. Call your brother."

And underneath, already, the small cold question: how long will this one hold me?