Isaiah Coleman

You are standing at a grocery shelf in Houston with a box cutter in Hector Almaraz's hand, and you are done with him. Not because he fails you. His back hurts in a low, steady way, a hot wire under the belt, and the soft belly pushes against the apron, and the cold from the dairy case has gotten into both knuckles. But that is not it. Forty minutes ago a woman asked him in Spanish where the masa was, and you stood there with her words going past you like traffic. He knew them. You could feel the place where they would have been. You are tired of owning a man and not owning a single thing he knows. So you set the cutter down on the cans and open the page with the wheel.

You pay. You spin. The ticking runs down.

The rhythm breaks. Your right hand goes to the jacket button and does it wrong, a half-fumble, thumb on the wrong side. You do it again slowly and correctly. Then ten more times, each one checked, though this has not needed checking in years.

You are standing in a hotel lobby. Glass wall, yellow light, a thunderhead stacked black over cut wheat stubble. A lanyard swings against your sternum. Your shoulders are wide and tight inside a jacket that fits them. Your feet are in leather shoes, and the floor is cool and polished through the soles.

The jacket gives you the first memory, in the weave under your fingers. Six this morning, a motel mirror, and his thumbs working the buttons of the pale blue shirt from the bottom up, because he always starts at the bottom. He rolled each cuff twice. He stood a while pressing his curls up with his palms. The blue in them has faded, and he keeps meaning to redo it. Dread sits in this memory like a stone. Today is the meeting with the grain-elevator people, and he has rehearsed the number four times in the shower.

Your right hand moves on its own into the trouser pocket and closes on a lighter. It flips it over, over, over. He does not smoke and never did. Your thumb knows the wheel's drag. Then the memory: a girl's porch step, a dead cousin's lighter handed over in a parking lot, her laughing at him for carrying fire he never lit. Warmth, fast and private. He calls her Dee. He is going to call her at lunch.

The beard is dense and soft under your knuckle, and you feel his unease about it. Your calves ache from standing. The strap of the lanyard has rubbed the side of your neck raw in one narrow line. Under all of it is a hard young strength, thighs and chest and a heart that runs easy. You stand in a frame twenty-four years old and nothing in it is tired.

Through the glass the wind lifts, and the light goes from yellow to something nearer brass. The air in the lobby smells of coffee and carpet cleaner, and under it the cold, mineral smell of rain coming. He loves that smell. You know that without being told.

You lift your hands and look at them. The calluses are not from work. They are from a weight bench, a steering wheel, and a hundred handshakes. You turn them over. Then you look up, into the glass, at a stranger's brown eyes.

"Okay," you say, and his voice comes out low and warm. "Okay. Hello."

Somewhere behind you the wheel is still turning in your head, just quietly, and you do not know how long this one lasts.