Marco Villalpando

Carlos Verduzco's kitchen is quiet at this hour, and his knees ache when you crouch to check the fridge is stocked the way he likes it, and you realize sixteen minutes was never going to be enough. You didn't take him for the ache. You took him because the site said comfortable, and because the first spin had been someone poor and it had scared you how little that man had, and Carlos was supposed to fix that — a house, a paid-off truck, a gray in his stubble that felt like an answer. But sitting at his little table with his phone in his borrowed hand, thumbing back to vessel.cards, you already know: a man's life is not a number, and Carlos's is small in a way the money doesn't touch, and the itch under your — his — skin says *spin again, see what else there is*. You tell yourself it's curiosity. You pay. You spin.

The step stool creaks under a boot that isn't Carlos's boot, and your knee bends into a stance you didn't choose, one foot up, one still on the concrete, and the walk-in's cold breath rolls out over a face that a half-second ago was someone else's. The hoses — red, yellow, blue — swing against a chest that is not the chest you had. Your hand, wrapped around a manifold gauge, twitches through the last motion of a task it has done ten thousand times, and gets it wrong, some small wrong throw of the wrist, and then again, slow, correct. Cold fog curls past your jaw. Somewhere behind you a compressor kicks on with a shudder you feel in teeth that are not the ones you had a breath ago.

The jacket is what opens first — quilted, zipped to the throat, worn soft at the elbows — and through it comes a whole morning: him standing in a bedroom with gray light coming through cheap blinds, pulling this same jacket off a hook by the door, shrugging into it one arm and then wincing, always the left shoulder first because the right one doesn't forgive quick movement before ten a.m. His back complains low and constant, an old ache seated somewhere between the shoulder blades that no mattress has ever fixed, and his hands — thick-knuckled, sure — know this jacket's zipper without looking, a specific hitch two inches from the top where the teeth catch. He remembers, dressing, glancing at the little dresser mirror and running a hand over his scalp, not vanity, just habit, checking the part held through the night. Marco. The name arrives with the mole — high on the cheek, the thing people notice second, after his eyes, which are hazel and tired in a particular late-Sunday-night way, because his shift is graveyard tonight, a fill-in for a sick coworker, and it is somewhere near midnight for him just as it is somewhere near midnight for the man you were leaving, two clocks lined up like coins.

The hoses against your shoulder bring the shop van, five a.m. starts for years before this shift got flipped onto him, the smell of refrigerant and hot solder, a trade he fell into at twenty-two and got good at with his hands before his head ever caught up. The steel step under your boot brings a hundred walk-ins like this one, backrooms of taquerias and liquor stores and this grocery, tonight's job, an evaporator coil icing wrong. The wedding band on the left hand brings Teresa — not the ex, the ex is a different weight, a divorce eleven years old that still shows up some nights as a specific kind of quiet he doesn't explain to her — but Teresa now, asleep probably, or awake watching something with the volume low, waiting up though she'd never say so. No kids. He'd wanted them once, with the first one; stopped wanting anything he couldn't get with the second. Evangelical since a rough stretch in his twenties, church on Sundays when the shift allows, a card in his wallet from an AA meeting he doesn't attend anymore because he didn't need to keep going, he just needed to stop, and did, four years back, the way he also just stopped the cigarettes, quiet, without ceremony, the same stubbornness both times. The tattoo under his sleeve — an eagle, bold lines gone soft with a decade of sun — was a bad-decision-at-twenty-four tattoo that he now likes, mostly, the same way he likes most of what he used to think were his mistakes.

Your hand — his hand — finishes the checked motion, tenth in a row, gauge seated right, and you become aware of the ache riding his lower back like a passenger, and how his hand, freed a moment, drifts up on its own and runs once over the combed-over hair, checking the part, an old tic that isn't yours and now is.

You look at the hand. Turn it, gauge still hooked in two fingers, mole catching the fluorescent light when you tip your face up into the cold coming off the coil, and past it, toward whatever's watching.

"Didn't know I had it this good," you say, and you don't mean the job.