Hector Almaraz

You are standing in Marcos Ibarra's kitchen light, which is the gray before the sun reaches Los Angeles, and you are done with his eye. The lazy one. For six minutes this morning you tried to read the tiny print on a breaker panel and the left side of the world kept sliding off its mark, a half-inch of drift you could never close. You have been him for less than a minute of your own counting, and already the whole body is a conversation about what it cannot quite do. You do not say this to yourself in so many words. You just open the page, and the wheel is there, and you press.

Then the music starts over at its first bar, a thin synthetic piano, and his shoulder lets go of the phone. It drops into your hand mid-loop. The pen under your other hand stops on the second digit of a reference number and stays there.

You do not move yet. You are in a kitchen with a window full of white morning, and your weight is on the heels of two flat dark sneakers, and the counter edge presses a line across your hip. Your breath comes slower than the last man's. It has more room in it and more under it, a softness at the belt that rides forward when you inhale.

Your jaw is working. There is gum in your mouth, mint gone nearly to nothing, and you are chewing it without having decided to. The pen wants to circle. The thumb wants to click the phone dark. Your hands know this room better than you do.

The cheap envelope under your fingers is rough, and it gives you the first thing: a pen-circled number, a long phone call, a roof. A woman's voice reading a policy back to him, and his patience going thin and polite. It is not your patience. It is a hail season's worth of it, stacked, and under it a flat private pride that he has never once let a claim go through on a lie or a sob. You see a driveway, a car dimpled like hammered tin, and a clipboard held against a hip.

The T-shirt is soft at the collar, washed to the color of a plum going gray. The morning arrives through it. He pulled it from the pile on the dryer because the cleaner shirts were for the field. He had one arm in before he found the other sleeve, and he stood in the hall scratching his bare scalp, then smoothed the beard along his jaw with his knuckles, a small habit, tidy. Then the jeans, stiff at the knee, belt notched on the third hole where it has lived since he stopped pretending. A wedding-sized band sits on his right hand, and there is no wedding in it. It was his father's, and your thumb finds it and turns it, and a smell of cut limes and a man's laugh in a doorway comes up, enormous and gone.

Under your feet the linoleum is cold through the soles. Your lower back aches in one precise place, the ache of a man who crouches under porches and climbs onto roofs for a living. Your shoulders are broad and your forearms thick, good for carrying a ladder and for nothing graceful. You are rich, you learn, from the keys by the envelope: a quiet, boring, careful richness, houses bought young and left alone, a number he never says aloud. He lives in this old kitchen anyway. Dishes drying. Four mugs. He likes it. There is a small tin of nicotine pouches in the pocket, and your tongue already wants the sting under the lip.

The hold music loops again. Your thumb ends the call.

You lift your right hand and look at it, turning it over. Broad palm, a pen callus on the middle finger, the band dull against the knuckle. It is an honest hand. Then you raise your eyes, and say to the window, softly, "Okay. You'll do."

And somewhere under the gum and the quiet, the wanting is already asking how long.