Leo Yazzie

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Sixteen minutes ago you became somebody worth having, and that should have been enough. Rafael Cintron's shoulders fill his doorway. Rafael Cintron's line supervisor likes him. Rafael Cintron has a gap in his front teeth that a woman on the floor called cute this morning, and you felt that landing, secondhand, like a coin dropped in a jar that isn't yours. You have been him for the length of a sitcom and you are already standing at the back door with his phone in his hand, thumb finding the browser like it knows the way better than you do. The line hums behind you, second shift grinding down toward evening. It should be enough. It is Monday, end of day, and something in you that is not tiredness and not boredom either — something closer to hunger that has learned to disguise itself as curiosity — says *one more, just to see.* You do not examine it further than that. You have spun this wheel 963 times. Examining it stopped being necessary a long time ago.

You spin. The screen loads a wheel, then a face.

—

The world is white-gold and enormous, tipped sideways, a car's undercarriage two feet from your nose. Your hand — his hand — is already up inside the wheel well, fingers hooked around a lug, and it is doing the wrong thing, has just done the wrong thing, some small correction skipped. You feel the mistake arrive a half-second after the muscle already knows it: the wrench slips a notch it shouldn't. You redo it. Slow. Correct. You do it again, checking, and again, checking, ten times in a row on a torque pattern this body has done ten thousand times without once needing to look. Somewhere behind your teeth is the ghost of a vape pull he hasn't taken in an hour. Heat comes off the concrete through his boots. A saguaro throws a long blue shadow across the gravel lot outside the bay, and the light is the flat gold of early evening even though your last body had just clocked toward its own evening a thousand miles east, an hour ahead — his day ending at the same clock-tick his day is ending, two different hours wearing the same word.

—

The shirt is what opens first — navy twill against your back, damp at the spine, a name patch stitched crooked because he sewed it on himself the week he started here. *Leo,* it says, and with the word comes the morning: sitting on the edge of a mattress that isn't made, pulling this exact shirt off a hook on the closet door, the smell of yesterday's oil still in the collar because he only washes it every third shift. Buttoning it one-handed while his daughter, two years old, stands in the doorway holding a shoe that isn't hers. He laughed at that. You feel the laugh in his chest before you feel anything of your own.

The rag in his back pocket gives you nothing at first — just cloth — until your fingers brush it checking a measurement and it unspools a whole account of the man who taught him this job, dead now three years, who used to say *check it twice, cut it once* about a saw he never let Leo near until he was nineteen. The lug wrench in his hand carries the weekday itself: the two-bay garage that's his own, technically, on paper, mortgaged to a bank in Mesa, the gravel yard out front that he waters exactly never and the saguaros nobody planted that were simply already there when he bought the lot. Scraping by. He knows the number in his account to the dollar. He does not let himself think about it more than once a day.

The tattoo on his forearm is the loudest thing. Black-and-gray, a face — his grandmother, gone the winter he turned twenty-two, and when his arm brushes the fender getting a better angle on the wheel, you get her whole: her kitchen, her hands showing him how to fold something he's since forgotten how to fold, her voice saying his name the long way, not Leo, the name underneath Leo, which comes to you only as warmth and not as sound, because that is not yours to have clearly. He got the tattoo the year after. His girlfriend now traces it sometimes with one finger when they're lying still and doesn't ask about it, and that not-asking is its own kind of gift, one he's grateful for in a way he's never said aloud to her. There was an ex before her — years back, loud where this one is quiet, a fight that ended things that he still turns over sometimes at 2 a.m., not with longing exactly, more like checking a scar to see if it still hurts. It does, a little. Not enough to matter.

His body: twenty-six, a mechanic's hands, first knuckle on the right thumb slightly thick from an old crush that healed wrong and never got looked at. Low back sore in the specific way of a man who spends his day bent under raised steel. Good shoulders. Steady, until you arrived and made him second-guess a torque pattern for the first time in years. The drift in his eye you feel only as a faint asymmetry in how the garage's edges sit in his vision, nothing more, something he stopped noticing about himself around age nine and you are noticing now for him. He quit drinking two years ago without ceremony, just stopped buying it, and the vape in his shirt pocket is a small constant weight he reaches for out of habit more than need. He clicks a pen sometimes without knowing he does it — there's a pen in the front pocket right now, capped, waiting for an invoice he hasn't started.

His son is three. Lives with the girlfriend. He is halfway through this shift because he took the early hours off to see him this morning, another thing you catch only in fragments — small arms, a fire truck toy missing one wheel, the particular exhaustion of loving something that small on four hours of sleep.

—

The wrench is still in your hand. You set it down on the fender, slow, and turn your palm up to the gold light coming through the bay door, and it is not the hand you were wearing sixteen minutes ago, not the hand you were wearing 963 spins before that, and for one long second that is the whole of what you know for certain.

"Hey," you say, to no one, just to hear it come out of his mouth, "who's that."

The saguaros hold their shadows. The garage hums with the last heat of the day. You do not know yet how long you keep him.