Hector Salgado

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You have been waiting a long time in a place with no weather.

He comes in at eleven-forty, ahead of the lunch rush, and takes the booth by the window because it is the booth he always takes. The Golden Dragon on Main, in a town in Western Kansas where the wheat is cut to stubble for forty miles in every direction and a thunderhead is stacking itself black in the northwest, and the light coming through that glass has gone the yellow of an old photograph. He orders for two. He does that. The girl who brings the teapot doesn't ask, because she's been bringing it for eleven years and she knows Marisol comes when she can and doesn't when she can't.

Today she can't. Showing in Scott City. Their daughter is nineteen and in Hays and calls on Sundays.

So he eats alone, and he cracks both cookies. That's a thing he does too — she doesn't want hers, she never wants hers, so he opens both and reads both and once, years ago, he told her the second fortune was hers whether she read it or not, and she laughed, and that was one of the good years.

You watch him from wherever it is you watch from. Fifty-three, five foot six, twenty-five pounds heavier than the man in the photo on the office wall, the one where the sport coat still buttoned. Gray-silver hair combed with water. Brown eyes going down at the corners, patient, a little sunk in the fuller face. A plain gold band on the left hand, worn thin on the inside where it turns. Nothing else about him you'd notice. That is not an insult. Nobody who wants anything is noticed in Western Kansas.

He breaks the first cookie. Two halves, the slip curled out. HAPPINESS IS A CHOICE.

He reads it and his mouth does a small thing — not a smile, the thing a man's mouth does instead of a smile when he's alone. He sets the halves on the plate.

He breaks the second one. Marisol's.

And here is what he thinks while the shell comes apart between his thumbs, and you hear it because you are close enough now to hear it: *I would like to not be me for a while.* Not dramatic. Not despair. Just the wish of a man who has stood on eleven hundred porches with a lockbox in his hand saying *and this is the mudroom, you could put a bench right here*, a man who has sold every house in this county twice and lived in none of them, a man who at some point stopped being the guy in the photo and became the guy who orders for two.

*Just for a while. Somebody else. Anybody.*

Wishes go wrong the way pipes go wrong. Not with a bang. With something arriving from the wrong direction.

You come up through the crack in the cookie like water finding a seam.

His head goes back. Light — and it is light, actual light, the yellow of that window doubled and coming *out* — pours from his open mouth and from both eyes and lays a hard bright wedge on the ceiling tile for a second and a half. The teapot lid rattles. Then it snaps off like a switch and he drops forward loose, hands slack on the laminate, and for one breath there is nobody home.

Then you.

You look at the hands. Twenty seconds, just looking. Thick fingers, a nick on one knuckle from a storm door in June, the ring. You turn the left hand over. You bend the fingers and they bend. You are inside a warm slow body that smells faintly of aftershave and General Tso's and you are so glad, so unspeakably glad, that if this body could weep you would let it, but you don't know yet where the crying is kept.

The slip of paper is still on the table.

You read it. You look up at the empty chair across from you — the second cracked cookie lying open there, the untouched water glass — and you look back down and read it again, slowly, the way you'd read your own handwriting in a drawer you forgot you filled.

Then you set it down. Squared to the edge of the table. The small satisfied care of a man who wrote it himself.

The girl comes with the check and you say thank you, Denise, because he knew her name and you find it right there where he left it, on top, like keys in a bowl. You leave four dollars. You take his blazer off the hook and it is heavy on the shoulders and the shoulders are yours.

You have one month.

You go out into the yellow light with the storm walking toward town and you stand in the gravel lot next to a Silverado with a magnetic sign on the door — SALGADO REALTY, HECTOR SALGADO, BROKER/OWNER — and you laugh, once, out loud, in a stranger's voice.

Here is what you do with the month, since nobody is going to ask.

You keep every appointment. All of them. You stand on the porch of a listing on the north edge of town with the lockbox in your hand and you turn the dial and the shackle drops and you let people into a house and you say *and this is the mudroom* and something in your throat aches with pleasure at the ordinariness of it. You are very good at it. Not because you know real estate — you know nothing — but because you cannot stop looking at people, and it turns out that looking at people is the whole job. You sell a farmhouse in nine days that sat two hundred and eleven. Denise's brother-in-law's place. Cash offer.

You eat. God, you eat. You eat a hot dog from the Loaf 'N Jug at seven in the morning standing in the parking lot watching the sun come up over the elevator and you would trade a year of the afterlife for it. You do not lose the twenty-five pounds. You are not interested in losing them. They are yours, they are warm, they push out over the waistband when you sit, and every time you catch the shape of yourself in the glass door of the office you feel the same helpless gratitude, because for a very long time you were nothing at all and now you take up space.

You call the daughter on a Wednesday. Not Sunday. She says *Dad? Is something wrong?* and you say no, mija, nothing's wrong, tell me about the classes, and she talks for fifty minutes and you say almost nothing and she says, at the end, in a strange careful voice, *that was nice.*

And Marisol.

You do not know how to be a husband. You know how to be a guest. So you are a guest: attentive, delighted, easily astonished by her. You notice the new haircut on the day of the haircut. You put your hand flat on her back in the kitchen for no reason and leave it there. You take her to the Golden Dragon on a Tuesday and order for two and when the cookies come you push both across the table and say *both of them are yours, they always were,* and she looks at you for a long moment with something in her face that isn't suspicion, exactly, and says *Hector, what has gotten into you.*

You say: you married a lucky man.

She reaches over and turns the ring on your finger, thin side up, the way she's done for twenty-six years, and you have to look out the window at the stubble and the black cloud stacking so she can't see what a body does when it's being loved for someone else's sake.

Twenty-nine days in, you begin returning things. That's what it feels like. Putting the keys back in the bowl. You write in his book: every lockbox code, every seller's soft spot, the Kruger listing, price it at 249 not 265, she'll take it, she just wants to be asked twice. You leave the daughter's number in the recents four times so his thumb finds it. You leave four dollars folded under the sugar caddy at the Golden Dragon because Denise's boy is going to State and you will not be here to see it.

The last night you sit on the tailgate in the yard and you make the body breathe as slowly as it will go, in and out, gray-silver head tipped back, the wet green smell coming off the cut ground before rain.

You did not repair him. You want to be clear about that, with yourself, since there is nobody else. You did not fix his marriage or his heart or the twenty-five pounds. You borrowed a man for a month and you spent it the way you spend money that isn't yours: fast, and on nothing, and every dollar of it on being alive.

But when he comes back — and he does, all at once, in the dark, in his own yard, blinking at his own hands with a cold beer going warm in one of them — he will find his life sitting there squared to the edge of the table. Wife in the doorway saying *are you coming in.* Daughter's number four times in the phone. Nine-day sale. And no memory of any of it, only a whole month of the strangest and best weather, and a feeling in his chest like a fortune he wrote himself and forgot and found again.

He'll decide he chose it. Happiness is a choice. He'll believe he chose it.

Let him. It's the only tip you can leave.