Hector Villanueva

The monk's hands are folded when I decide. Dallas, before the bells, the cell still blue and cold, and I am sitting on a cot with a bare scalp under my palm and a goatee I have been told to keep neat. Fifty-nine years old, and the knees have already begun their complaint. For the length of one prayer he has been mine. What sends me back is the silence. He has a whole life built on it, and I can hear every second of it ticking. I wanted a room with a noise in it. I wanted somebody's morning to be loud. So I spin, and the monk goes out of me like breath.

Cold porcelain under the left hand. Foam on half my face, a razor stopped against the jaw, the bathroom close and damp, a gray window over the tub. I am bent over a sink, and my weight is all wrong: low, thick, heavy through the middle, the floor tile cold under bare feet. The razor moves. Up the jaw, against the grain, past the corner of the mouth without stopping, and the second half goes faster than the first.

The sink is where it starts. The enamel is chipped under my thumb, and the chip knows me. A flash: this basin, a night, a baby's weight on my forearm, three of them over the years, and a woman's voice from the hall saying the water is running, Hector, the water is running. Love, and tired, and the same tired for twenty years.

The razor handle is plastic, warm now. Every morning the corner of the mouth is where I hesitate. I know it from somewhere in my wrist, a flinch from a boy's first shave, his father's blade, a cut that bled through a funeral. Not today. Today something in me is quicker than he was.

My left leg is bouncing against the tub, a hammering that never stops. His. It has bounced through every hearing he has ever stood at, through a judge's long sigh, through a client's mother crying in a hallway thick with people and the smell of floor wax and wet coats. A flash of that hallway: I am small in it, five foot three in a crowd of taller men, and I am the one they hurry toward. Public defender. I hear a name, a boy of nineteen, and the sentence I could not shorten. Under it, the ring on my left hand. I turn the band with my thumb and the other woman arrives, not the wife: a girl on a porch in summer, the one who got away, her laugh, the screen door. He still carries her like a stone in a pocket, worn smooth, never put down.

The T-shirt is soft and old, dark with grime at the hem. Beneath the work he does there is some other work: a garage, a weekend, a brother-in-law's truck. The sweatpants sag at the knee. I remember nothing of dressing; these are the clothes he sleeps and shaves in, the ones before the suit. The suit is hanging somewhere in this house. A navy jacket, the briefcase of brown leather with its scuffed corner, the gray tie his oldest picked out. Not yet. There is no time for any of it yet.

My shoulders are thick, the forearms inked in black tribal lines, the belly pressing the sink. Strong in a stubborn way. The knees ache a little. The jaw is cool where the foam is gone, and the moustache above it is all that is left of him in the mirror, flecked gray. A drink or two most evenings, he would say, and the glass is in my throat for a second: amber, a lamp, the quiet after the kids.

I put the razor down on the rim of the sink. I lift my hand into the gray window light and turn it over. The wedding band. The knuckles. The black ink climbing the wrist. Then I look up into the mirror, at the blue eyes, at the stranger with half a face of foam.

"Good morning, Hector," I say, and the voice is low and rough and entirely his.

How long, I wonder, before the wanting comes back? Tomorrow, or four minutes from now, with the water still running?