Luis Arroyo

Vernon Telesco's left leg ends below the knee, and the prosthetic has been rubbing a coin of raw skin there since noon. That is the first thing I understand about why I'm leaving. The second is that I'm standing in his kitchen in Houston, in the middle of the night, with a glass of water I haven't drunk, and the house is so quiet I can hear the refrigerator thinking. He was a good body. He is sixty-five and kind and slow, and his wife's reading glasses are folded on the windowsill like a small animal asleep. Nothing is wrong with him. That's what I can't say out loud. Nothing is wrong, and I stood in his kitchen for forty minutes wanting something that wasn't in it, and then I opened the page with the wheel on it.

It turns. I don't decide. I never quite decide.

The hum arrives first, a fluorescent tube directly overhead, a thin electric buzz in my teeth. Then the warmth in my right hand, a sock, still hot from the dryer. My knees are bent. I'm crouched at an open door with the heat of it on my face, and my legs take it easily, no prosthetic, two knees, both of them mine for now. After the leg, it's like being handed back a held breath.

I pull the load out in one armful, drop it in the basket, and my hands begin without me. Shirt, shake, fold the sleeves in, corners squared, a crease like a blade. Fast. Precise. My hands know this the way a mouth knows a word.

Then the sweatshirt on my back, soft and washed gray, gives me a morning. Not mine. His. Dark outside the little window, the girlfriend still asleep, and he pulls this on over his head because the basement is cold before the sun reaches the block. He pulls the sleeves down over his wrists one at a time, left, then right. He's thinking about a budget meeting. He's thinking, quietly, proud, that he hasn't had a drink in six years and today is just a Tuesday.

The jeans are stiff at the knee, and through them comes the office: a glass wall, the door always open because he decided long ago that a manager who shuts the door teaches people to whisper. A young woman cries once in that doorway, and he gives her the whole afternoon and no advice. I feel his tenderness for it, and it isn't mine.

The sock is warm. It gives me her: the girlfriend upstairs, her cold feet on his calves, and eight crumpled shirts in a drawer she laughs at him for. Under that, older, another woman. An ex, a porch, a long argument that ended kindly, and a sadness he keeps folded small, the way I'm folding this shirt.

The concrete is cold through the soles. The knees ache faintly, thirty-eight and fine. The jaw is smooth, freshly shaved. Freckles I can't see but can feel, sun-warm somehow, on a face that has never been vain about them. Five foot five, so the shelves sit just at my reach. He's solid and compact and steady. Money sits in him too, a quiet number he never mentions, the marble steps he'll climb later, the rowhouse door.

I stand. The tube hums. I turn my hand over in the light, the palm creased and warm, a stranger's, entirely mine.

"Okay," I say, and his voice is lower than I expected. "Hello."

Upstairs a floorboard creaks. Somewhere a man in Houston has a glass of water going warm, and I wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether I'm still him by lunch.