Hector Villanueva

You are standing in Ryan Gallagher's kitchen in Philadelphia, and he has been yours for two minutes. His coffee is going cold. His phone says Tuesday. His knees don't hurt and his back doesn't hurt and none of it is enough. You didn't spin because of him. You spun because of the quiet in his apartment, the way it asked nothing of you, and because you can't stand a body that asks nothing. You put his thumb on the screen and say yes to the wheel.

Green. Water going by, loud and brown. You are on planks, and something is in your right hand.

The rhythm breaks. Your hand, his hand, has already begun to strip a wire, and it does the thing wrong, a half-second slip. You do it again slowly and it comes right. Then ten more, each one checked, because you don't trust a hand that knows more than you do.

The pliers are yellow-handled, the grip worn smooth where a thumb always rests. Through them comes a flash that isn't yours: a kitchen table, a girl of nine holding a dead-bolt box and asking if it will keep the bad things out. He said yes, and he felt it in his chest like a bell. Two kids. You feel their weight in him before you know their names.

The shirt is damp at the shoulder blades and the sleeves are rolled twice. The morning comes up through the cloth: he buttoned it standing in a dark hallway so as not to wake anyone, left cuff first, fingers thick and sure, a little breath of pride at the stitched name over the pocket. RAUL, it says. Not Hector. A cousin's old shirt? No, a mistake at the uniform shop he never bothered to correct, because the crew had called him Raul for eleven years and he liked being someone a little easier to say.

The belt sags with the pouch. The leather holds a memory of a rosary wound once around a screwdriver handle, his mother's, and a quick Hail Mary mouthed on ladders. Under your boots the planks give and sway, and your calves know the sway. Your belly sits over the belt like a settled thing. Your knees ache at the same place every afternoon. He is short, and the bridge rail meets you at the hip, and he has never minded.

Then a woman's laugh, from nowhere, from his palm: a girlfriend, a porch, a tomato she wouldn't let him cut. And behind her, fainter, an older ex, a hard winter, a thing he still doesn't say aloud. It sits in his ribs like a coin swallowed. He quit drinking in a parking lot behind a church and never told anyone it was that church.

Your own wanting is already stirring under all of it, thin and familiar.

You turn the hand over. Calluses, a pale crease, wire ends bright as new copper. You lift your eyes to the creek, then to the green nothing past it.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice, and it sounds like a stranger's. "Show me what you were doing."

The water keeps going. You don't know how long this one lasts.