Isaac Mendoza Reyes

You are Ramón Aguilar Teller, sixty-three, and the house is asleep around you. Your knees are a quiet argument. The bed is wide and the woman beside you breathes slow and warm. Your bald scalp is cold against the pillow. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. You have been up since the clock turned over, running the numbers of this life the way he ran them for thirty years, and the numbers come out fine. He was fine. The refrigerator in the hall hums its one note. You felt nothing at dinner, nothing at the wine he drank, nothing when his daughter's name lit the phone. You reach for the phone now because your thumb already knows the page. The wheel waits, turning its little wedge of faces. You are not unhappy. You are only finished, the way you finish a glass, and you press.

He is on his side in the dark, and the light is on your cheek.

The phone is six inches from your face, and your thumb has stopped mid-scroll on something you do not see. Mattress springs press your hip. The room is cold on the ear you are not lying on. Then the thumb moves, faster and steadier than he ever moved it, flicking past everything he had stopped on, and you let it. You are lean. You feel it at once: the ribs against the sheet, the hip bone like a hinge, a body that burns what it is given. Your eyes sting. You have not blinked in a while.

The sleeve at your wrist is soft, washed thin. It is the shirt he lay down in, and the cotton gives you the first thing. He pulled it from the pile on the chair, the pile he never folds, because Marisol was on her shift and nobody would see. Then a morning behind it: the tunnel exit, the roar, the towel on his shoulder gone heavy. His arm knows the long sweep across a hood, the small circle on the mirror housing, the way the water runs off a roof in a sheet. The ache lives in the shoulder, a dull coin. Somewhere a customer tips him five dollars and says "Gracias, joven," and he is pleased out of all proportion, and you are pleased with him.

The sweatpants hold his knee against the mattress, and the knee remembers something else. Marisol laughing in the kitchen of the turquoise house, the dust on the chain-link gone gold, her hand flat on his chest saying, you're too skinny to be this stubborn. His dimples ache, the cheeks pulled up by a memory before your face decides anything. The ring turns under your thumb on the phone's edge, and he is standing in a courthouse hallway with his hands sweating, afraid of nothing but dropping it. It is a plain band and cost more than he said it did.

His socks are damp with the day. The carpet beyond the bed, the cords on the floor, the cheap fan, all of it smells of rubber, soap and hot dust. He has never touched a drink, because his uncle did enough for the whole family. You find that in him like a stone in a pocket. The vape is on the nightstand, for the guys outside the lot on break, only ever socially, never alone. He is careful, you think. He has been careful his whole life.

You set the phone down on the mattress. You lift your left hand into the glow, turn it over, palm and then knuckles, the band catching the blue. The fingers are long and chapped, strong in the pads. The beard scrapes your jaw when you smile, and the dimples come without your asking. You look up.

"Hello, Isaac," you say, quietly, to the dark, and his voice is lighter than yours was, and kind. "How long do I get you?"

The phone glows on the sheet. The wheel is still there, behind everything, turning.