Hector Luis Barraza

You are standing in Matthew Sorensen's kitchen in the gray before the day, and the coffee he made is going cold in your hand because you cannot stand the taste of it. Forty-five years of investments have given him this: a quiet counter, a window on the street, and a broken nose that whistles when he breathes through it. Every one of his mornings is a clean one, and you have no use for any of them. You came back to the wheel last time because he could do everything and want nothing. Now you hold his phone, the site open, and your thumb knows the way. The wheel turns under your thumb, and you stop being a man in a kitchen.

The mattress takes your weight before you do. Face-down, one arm hanging, the sheet damp under your cheek, your breath dragging ragged through a mouth gone dry. The dark has a thin orange seam in it where the curtains don't meet. Then your lungs even out, and the hanging arm draws itself up, and you roll onto your back and fold your hands on your chest like a man laid out. He has never once slept like that. You are the one who did it.

Nothing is yours yet. You lie there and the room starts to hand him over by pieces.

The shirt first: long-sleeved, cotton gone soft, still on him from last night. Where it bunches under your ribs it gives you a flash. He lay down without undressing, too tired to be a man who undresses. Then the whole day behind it, in his feeling. The truck at five. The cold coming up through his boots in the trench. The mini excavator shuddering beside him, spoil piled higher than his shoulder, and the foreman calling him Hector in the voice people use for someone who always shows up. The tired is a good one. It sits in the long muscles of his back and in the forearms, a thick, honest ache, the ache of a body that is used. He is forty-five and five foot five and built like a fist, and everything in you is heavier and closer to the ground than anything you have worn.

The jeans, rough against your knees, are the ones from the trench. A flash: his hand pressing the thigh seam flat to dry in front of a heater, patient, because there is only one good pair. Under the heel of your palm the pocket holds a small hard shape, and the vape comes to mind before you touch it. The long pull at the truck window, the sweet fake mango. A habit that took the place of the drinking. Three years without. He counts it, privately, on mornings like this. Nobody knows he counts.

Your right hand has crept toward your left, and your thumb finds the ring finger. The skin there is smooth and paler, a narrow tan band where something lived for years. The memory arrives whole and it is not yours. A kitchen with a yellow light, a woman's back at the sink, the sound of a ring set down on a counter that wasn't loud at all. He didn't argue. He thought afterward that he should have. Two children, a boy and a girl, and the way the girl still says his name on the phone like a question she is checking the answer to. The ring is in a drawer somewhere in this apartment. He knows which drawer. You don't, and the not-knowing is the only part of him that is yours.

You lift your hand to your face, because the jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and under your fingers the skin of the neck is different, warmer, with no texture to it. The birthmark. He shaved around it with care every morning and in school they used to ask if it hurt. The memory is a boy's, a bus seat, a stare, and then the long learning to look back at people until they looked away.

The streetlight leans through the gap in the curtains. Snow-light, the dead middle of the night, a whole city asleep that you are the only one awake in. The snowmobile under its blue tarp out back, the plywood behind it. He means to ride it in March. He has said so to his son.

You hold your hand up in the orange seam of light and turn it over. Wide palm, split nails, a scar of calluses where a shovel lives. It is the hand of a man who has never been handed anything.

"Okay," you say, and the voice is low and gravel-warm and rolls through you like a truck on a gravel road. "Hector."

It fits for now. You don't know whether it fits for an hour or a year, or whether the wanting that sent you here will be back before the light comes up.