Hector Almaraz

You leave Keith Lindqvist on a bathroom floor in Los Angeles, in the gray before the day, with plaster dust still in the creases of his knuckles and a bad shoulder you never got used to. He was fine. He was a body that worked. But the first thing he did, in the minute you had him, was reach for the coffee can on the counter and find it empty, and something in you went flat and mean and started looking for a door.

The neighbor's house was the door. Nine spins ago you were Curtis Haldane, 37, five foot six, call center, gray stubble, and you stood in his kitchen for less than a minute and watched through his window a man cross a lawn with a lunch cooler and a wedding band, a man who waved at Curtis like he'd been waving at him for years. You never got over the wave. You didn't want the man. You wanted to be someone people waved at. That is all you will admit.

You press the wheel, and the bathroom is gone.

Cold air, a long hum of lights, and a can in your gloved right hand, set down wrong. Your hand has put it a half turn off, label sideways, and it is already correcting itself, slow, deliberate. Then the next can, and you watch your hand check it. Then the next. Ten of them, each one checked, on a job your arms have not needed to check in years.

The glove is rough canvas, sweat gone cold inside it. Through the palm, the lip of a can, and something opens: a different aisle, years back, a manager named Ponce showing him the rotate-forward, rotate-back, and his shame at being thirty and learning it, his stubborn pride at doing it perfectly anyway.

The lanyard swings against your chest, and the badge knocks the vest. Vest: mesh, damp at the back. You get the morning in his hands: the gray shirt pulled from the dryer still warm, sleeves shoved to the elbow, the vest off the hook by the door, his wife asleep in the next room, and a small foot in the hallway that belongs to the youngest, who sleeps crosswise on the floor when she has bad dreams. He stepped over her. He stood there a second. He put his hand flat on the doorframe like he was blessing it.

Your leg is bouncing. It has been bouncing the whole time, the left heel drumming inside the boot, and you can't stop it. Pallet wrap crackles against your forearm. Under the cold there is the ache of a body that is soft over the middle and tired underneath, a back that knows the pallet, thighs strong from lifting, a belly that presses the belt when you crouch.

The ring. You turn it with your thumb and she comes: a woman who is not his wife, a bus stop, rain, Houston heat breaking into a storm, her laughing at his umbrella. The one who got away. He still thinks of her when he is not thinking, usually here, at this hour, hands busy, eyes elsewhere. You didn't ask for that. It sits in your chest like a swallowed stone, and under it the wife, and the three of them, and the real weight of what he carries on his rounds. A rosary in the glovebox. A mortgage he is paying faster than he has told anyone.

You look at your hands. Brown, thick-fingered, the gold band bright against the knuckle. Neither of them is Keith's. Neither is Curtis's.

You lift your eyes, and you say, to nobody, to the long white aisle: "Buenos días."

It's the only thing his mouth gives you without being asked. The leg keeps drumming. You wonder how long this one lasts, and whether the wanting will find you here, between the cans, before the shift is out.