Julio Carrasco

I am standing at a register in Small-town Ohio, in Dale Hutchins, and the morning is slow enough that I can hear the cooler hum. His beard itches at the collar. His knees ache when he shifts his weight. He has been mine less than a minute, and already I know the whole of it: the quiet, the coupons, the same three customers. Nothing is wrong with him. That is what is wrong. I wanted to be rained on, and he cannot give me that. I push the phone across the counter and spin.

Then it is wet.

It is cold on my face before I know I have a face. I have stepped out from under the shelter a beat early, hood falling back, and the runoff is running down my forehead, into the stubble, along the jaw. The board behind me says 3 MIN. I am standing in the water and I do not turn out of it. My shoulders are narrow, my belly soft under the jacket, and my breath comes up easy and cold.

The jacket is slick nylon, and its zipper pull is under my thumb. A flash comes in his feeling, not mine: this morning, the closet door that sticks, the gray work shirt taken off its hanger, one sleeve and then the other, the cuffs buttoned with the thick fingers that know buttons by touch. A girlfriend's voice from the other room, saying he will be late. He answers in Spanish, half-laughing, and the coffee is burnt, and he drinks it anyway.

My hand drifts to the pocket. Keys on a retractable reel, a badge. The metal is cold, and a school opens in me: a long corridor after the last bell, the floor wax smell, the wide mop going in slow figure eights, a radiator ticking. Pride sits in it, quiet and unannounced. Nobody sees this floor shine, and he knows it shines.

The boots are heavy and soaked through at the toes. Under them I feel the hours, the stairs, the standing. The small of my back has its own opinion. There is a mother's kitchen too, a rosary on a nail, a church basement folding chair. There was a cigarette habit once. My mouth remembers wanting one, and my lungs remember being glad it ended. The mole on my cheek is just a warmth where a raindrop slides past.

He had been cold for years, I realize. Not in the weather. The rain is the first thing in a long time that felt like it was only for him. He did not know why he stepped out. Neither does he now. He is not here to ask.

I lift my hand out of the rain and look at it. Calloused at the base of the fingers, the nails short and gray at the edges. I turn it over. The palm fills with water.

I look up, past the board, into the street's sodium blur.

"Okay," I say, in his voice, low, a little hoarse. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."