Kyle Brennan

You are leaving Efraín Lozano because of his knees, and because of the tape gun. Forty minutes into the shift a woman two aisles over laughed at something on her phone, and you stood there with a box of brake pads and understood that you did not want to go home to his quiet apartment either. His body is sixty-five and does everything it is asked, slowly, with commentary. The wheel is still open in the other tab. It is the middle of a Tuesday morning in Las Vegas. You press the button in the dry light of the warehouse and do not look back.

Then you are standing at a counter, tilted, one shoulder raised against a phone that is falling. The shoulder drops it. Your hand catches it before you have decided anything. Music loops back to its first bar, thin and cheerful, a keyboard pretending to be strings. The pen in your other hand has stopped on the second digit of a number on an envelope. Sun comes through the window, and it is a Tuesday morning here too, a late-feeling one, so he is either off or between jobs. The air is clean and warm and smells of dish soap.

The shirt comes first. Cotton, soft at the collar, a little tight across the shoulders, and the cuffs of the sleeves sit on his biceps. Your back remembers the morning: his hands pulling it off a chair, smelling it once and deciding it would do. His girlfriend's laugh from another room, saying he wore that one yesterday. He had not minded.

The counter is cool stone under your forearm, and it gives you the argument. A number on a bill that was wrong, a woman at a supply company who sounded kind and could do nothing. The pen is his, and your thumb knows the cap's chewed ridge. Behind that sits a worry, flat and heavy and familiar to him, about money, about a house worth less than the loan on it. He carries it like a toolbelt.

His hand rises without asking and rubs over the buzzed scalp, bristle against the palm. Then the jeans, stiff with old plaster. The belt buckle, the first notch. A job in a half-framed house, the shriek of a saw, sawdust on his tongue, a good day when the walls stood true. His knees are fine. His back has a low hum. His lungs ask for a pipe, cherry tobacco, the bowl warm in his palm at dusk. A bottle waits in some cupboard, and the wanting for it is already here, patient.

The floor is tile, cold through the socks. The calf itches where the ink is, and you do not need to look.

You look at his hands. Square, scarred across the knuckles, steady. You turn them over. Then you lift your eyes to the dark window glass and say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

The hold music starts again. Somewhere, your thumb is already waiting.