Hector Reyna

Walter Prescott's feet hurt in the government-issue boots, the way they hurt every night around this hour, and the lobby camera feed loops the same empty marble for the four hundredth time. You have been him less than a minute, and already you know the whole shape of the shift left in him: six more hours of nothing, a thermos going cold, a badge that says SECURITY and doesn't mean much. Somebody's kid used the side door again without swiping. Nobody will ever ask Walter about it. That's the thing about him, the thing you noticed inside of ten seconds — there's no bottom to how little happens in this life. You spun for excitement once. You don't remember why exactly you took Walter, some scroll of a night, but you remember instantly, standing here, that this isn't it. So you take out your phone, the way Walter would, and you open the site on a dead man's break, and you spin.

The couch takes your weight before you know it's a couch. Gray light strobing off a screen, low volume, a room gone the color of static and shadow. Your hand — his hand — is closing around a remote that's already down at your thigh, set there mid-motion, and your spine straightens on its own like something startled awake in a body that was slumping a second ago. The TV cuts to a bright interior, canned laughter rolling up out of it, and you don't laugh. You feel the muscles of his face get ready to and then not do it, like a word swallowed. Overcast light through a window somewhere behind you, going the flat blue of early evening. Your mouth tastes like spearmint gum, gone soft and pointless between your back teeth.

The remote's rubber buttons are worn smooth under your thumb, and that's the first thing that opens: a Tuesday, years back, arguing with a nephew over which button meant mute, patience fraying, gum going stale, the fight not really about the remote. Then the couch cushion under you gives up a whole winter — laid up after a stent, doctor's voice in his ear like a bell that won't stop, the taste of gum instead of the beer he wanted so bad his hands shook holding the clicker. Heart disease, the doctor's word for it, and Hector's own word for it something closer to *ticking*.

The sweatshirt against your back is soft with a hundred washes, and it gives you the morning he put it on — not today, some Tuesday like every other Tuesday, the flue brushes cold in the truck bed, breath showing in the kitchen before the coffee maker finished. His hands, roughened at the knuckle, know a joint of rod before his eyes do; they thread it without looking, a motion so old it isn't thought anymore, the give and catch of aluminum sections locking home, soot drifting down warm and gritty onto his collar no matter how careful he is. Sixty feet of ladder work in his knees. A cleft chin his mother used to press her thumb into when he was small, saying *there's God's fingerprint, right there.*

Denny's hand on his shoulder this morning, before the truck — Denny, ten years now, who doesn't ask why Hector goes quiet in October, who leaves the good mug out without being told. No fire between them the way people mean it, never was, and it was never a lack; it was Sunday services together and a bed shared for warmth and company and nothing else, and that was always whole on its own. A daughter's voice on the phone last week, grown now, careful with her father the way people get careful with a man whose heart is a countdown nobody says out loud. Evangelical grace before supper, said the same clumsy way every night, *thank you for what we have and for the day we get to keep having it.*

The gum is gone soft to nothing in his cheek. You feel the ache low in his chest that is always there now, a stitch that isn't pain yet, just a warning worn thin from repetition, and under it a thirst that has nothing to do with water — a want shaped exactly like a bottle, held off today the way it's held off most days, by will and by Denny's face and by nothing else. Fifty-six years old in a body that knows exactly how tired it is and keeps standing anyway.

You look down. The remote is still in his hand, and you turn it over once like you don't trust it, like it might tell you whose hand this really is.

"Didn't think that was funny," you say, out loud, to the empty room, and you set it down on the couch arm the way he already had, and you look up into the blue TV light, waiting to find out how long you get to be the man who said it.