Javier Mendoza

You are Gerald Thibodeaux, still, for a few seconds more. Five foot four, and the whole house at this hour is quiet except for the refrigerator and the dog's nails on the kitchen tile. Your shaved head is cold. Your scrubs are laid over the chair, and you have already put them on and taken them off once this morning for no reason. The body is good. Forty-six, strong in the shoulders, a nurse's back that knows how to lift. It worked fine. What sent you back is small and you would not say it aloud: last night a woman on your ward asked you to hold her hand, and the hands you were wearing did it so gently, so practiced, that it frightened you how little of it was yours. You thumb the wheel. It turns.

Cold concrete under your knees, then the hum. A fluorescent tube buzzes above you. You are crouched at an open dryer with one sock in your right hand and warmth rolling against your left arm. Lint, hot cotton, bleach. The weight sits low and dense: a muscular man, short and solid, thighs loaded in the crouch. Your breath comes slow. A barbell in the eyebrow tugs faintly when you blink.

You pull the load out. It is warm against your forearms, and the warmth opens something. The sock is gray with a heel patch, and you feel a small boy's feet, a small boy's loud laughter in a stairwell. His son. Javier's. The boy hides socks on purpose so that his father will hunt for them, and you feel the man pretend to be baffled every time.

The black shirt against your back is soft from a hundred washes. It comes with the morning: his hands pulling it over his head in the dark, careful not to wake her, the bed creaking, her breath turning over. His wife, Marisol, one bare shoulder under the sheet. He kissed it. The jeans came off the chair next, stiff at the knee. He had told himself he would look at listings again today and felt his stomach go small. The job at the warehouse ended in March. The savings are a number he checks and does not say.

You drop the load in the basket and your hands start folding before you decide anything. Shirts snap flat, corners squared, sleeves tucked. A fast, exact habit. Under it sits a flash of an older woman's kitchen and a mother who taught him this, hand over his hand, rosary on the doorknob. Mass at Saint Francis on Sundays, his knees hurting on the kneeler. A cigarette behind a bar with his cousin, only when there is a drink in him, and the shame of it afterward. Another flash, brief: an old girlfriend, Daniela, laughing on a fire escape in summer. It does not hurt him anymore, only warms, like a stone held in a pocket.

His dimples sit deep even now, with no one to smile at. You can feel them in your cheeks.

You look at your hands. Brown, broad, a plain gold ring on the left. You turn them over and the ring catches the tube light.

You look up and say, in a voice lower than any you have had, "Okay, Javier." The sock is still warm in your fist. You wonder how long this one lasts, and whether the wanting is already starting.