Lucas Barrientos

You were Wendell Shrewsbury for less than a minute, and the first thing you learned in him was that he could not carry a tune. You learned it by trying. The kitchen in Eastern Kentucky was dark, the refrigerator hummed a flat note, and you stood in his socks on cold linoleum and wanted to sing. The wanting was the whole reason you came back to the wheel. His throat could not do it, and neither could his breath. He was fifty-eight and bald under your palm, and the song went into him and came out as gravel. So you put the phone on the counter, and the page was still open, and the wheel was already turning.

Then there is chalk.

It is in the air and in the back of your throat, dry and mineral, and your right arm is up over your head with a sponge in the hand. A sheet of paper is in the other hand, curling against your thumb. Your calves are taut. You are up on the balls of your feet because the board is built for taller men, and you are short, and your body knows it. It has stretched for this board ten thousand times without once mentioning it.

The motion broke. Something in the arm went wrong, a swipe too wide. So you do it again, slowly, the way a man corrects a thing he thinks he has been getting wrong. Then ten more strokes, each one checked, though the board has not needed watching in years.

The lanyard swings against your chest and the keys on it click. You close your fingers on them, and the metal is warm from him. A boy comes up out of the keys, a gym floor and a whistle, a ball hitting a wall. His own hands, smaller then, learning that quick feet make up for height. The memory is proud, and it is not yours.

The shirt is pale blue, thin at the elbow. It gives you this morning in a flat with a window onto concrete. He buttons from the bottom up, cuff by cuff, left before right, and he runs a hand through the heavy red fringe and thinks, absurdly, of his mother's voice calling him *zanahoria*, carrot, and laughing, and loving him. He shaves slowly, and his thumb finds the cleft of his chin to guide the blade. You touch it now, smooth, and the memory is soft. He never drinks, and it is not a rule. He likes his mornings clear. On Sundays he sits in a back pew and prays for his students by name, and a few of those names come up under your tongue like pebbles.

Under his shoes is a floor that gives slightly. Behind the glass the courtyard wall is all graffiti under a white sky, and the light off it is flat and cold. His back aches the way a good day does. There is a little money put away, and a savings number he checks like a pulse. He has no one to tell, and nobody he is waiting on.

You lower the sponge. You turn your hand over: small, square, a callus from chalk and a fine dust in the creases. The nails are cut short.

You lift your eyes to the window, and then past it, and you say, in a voice that is lighter than any you have had, "Okay. Hello."

You wonder how long this one will hold, and when the wanting will come back for you.