Leonard Baca

You were a welder an hour ago, in the way that a coat is a coat. Twenty-eight, red beard, the freckled forearms with the old arc-flash shine along the left one, and the smell of flux in the hair. For two minutes you had him, and in those two minutes you stood in his kitchen in Los Angeles, barefoot on cold linoleum, with a sleeping house around you and the refrigerator humming. You opened it. You closed it. You held his own wrist up to the window light and turned it, and there was nothing in it that you wanted. He was strong and he was young and none of it was a thing you couldn't already do. That is what sent you back. Not that he failed you. That he was only a body, and you have had so many.

The page with the wheel on it was still open on the counter. You paid. You spun.

The car drifts a foot toward the line.

You come in straight, one smooth pull, and the wheel is under your palms already, vinyl and a little tacky. Both hands come off it and resettle lower and wider, because that is where you want them, and your right thumb finds the stalk and the turn signal ticks on for an exit that is not his. You did not know that. You know only that the highway is black, that the dash lights your knuckles amber and blue, that something in your chest is going tick, tick, tick in time with the signal.

Then the jacket. The collar of the dark zip fleece rubs against the side of your neck, and with it comes a morning: a closet door, a woman's voice from the bed saying *the blue one's in the wash, wear the plaid,* and his hands doing the buttons from the bottom up, always from the bottom up, because a nun in the third grade told him a crooked shirt is a crooked day. Under the fleece, the flannel, soft at the cuffs. He rolled them once. He is a man who rolls them once.

The wheel is warm. Your left hand wants to crack the right, and does, a slow pop across the knuckles, and the whole classroom floods up: the empty room after the last bell, chalk dust in a long window of white desert light, a boy's forgotten jacket on a chair, and this hand lifting it, because he would carry it to the lost-and-found himself at four o'clock rather than leave it. Twenty-six years of that. Your cheeks lift without your asking, the dimples going deep, and you do not know what he was thinking of.

The ring is cool on the finger and a little tight. It brings her: the porch, the turquoise wall behind her, the chain-link, dust on her ankles, her laughing at something he said about the dog. It brings two children, one on his shoulders at some fair, the weight of a small skull against his bald scalp. And under it, steady as a pulse, the other memory, the one nobody knows. A drink in his hand in a parking lot twelve years ago, and a decision made on his knees in a church that smelled of wax. He has not touched one since. The craving is in his mouth now, faint, a ghost, and so is the cigarette he gave up before it, the shape of it between two fingers. His body still wants to reach for both.

Your back is pressed to the seat. The shifter is a hard knob in your right hand's reach, and your feet know the clutch, the heel pivot, without being asked. Fifty-one years: a dull ache in the left knee, a tightness low in the spine from the hours of standing at the front of a room, a heart that goes slow and big. The beard is a warm weight on your jaw. You run your tongue across your teeth. The eyes are good, and the road comes into them very clearly.

The exit sign swims up green. Three miles from home, the house is dark, they are asleep, and you are the man turning toward the wrong ramp.

You lift your right hand off the wheel. You turn it over in the dash light. A plain band, a thick pad of callus at the base of the fingers where a pen sits, and a faint tremor of life. You look up into the rearview mirror, and he looks back with the dimples still deep at rest.

"Well," you say, in his low voice, "hello."

The signal keeps ticking. Somewhere your wanting is already asleep, or just pretending, and you wonder how long it will let you keep him: until the next exit, or the next year, or the end of this breath.