Marcos Fuentes

You are Ernesto Villalobos for the third minute of your life as him, standing in a shop that smells like steam and starch, and it is already unbearable. Your hands — his hands, gray-haired, careful — know exactly how to feel a seam for true, and that is the problem. Everything here is precision. Everything here is measured twice. You spun for the surprise of a new skin and got a man who irons his own patience into every cuff. Thirty-one spins of the wheel have taught you what you like, and you do not like this. Boredom sits in your chest like a swallowed stone. The shears on the table catch the light and you think: not this. Not one more minute of this.

You do not decide so much as reach. The site loads on a phone that isn't yours in a pocket that isn't yours. You spin.

The hold music completes its loop — a saxophone doing the same four bars for the hundredth time — and somewhere in the space between the last note and the first, you are a different weight entirely. Shorter by an inch, denser through the shoulders, a phone wedged hot against your jaw, a pen frozen on the second digit of a reference number that means nothing to you yet. Kitchen light overhead, flat and yellow. Linoleum under boots that have already been standing eleven hours. The phone slides off your shoulder into your hand out of pure reflex, his reflex, before you've caught up to owning it.

The pen is a cheap ballpoint, chewed at the cap, and the moment your fingers close fully around it something opens — not a memory exactly, more like a room with the light already on. You are fourteen dollars over on a part for a tankless heater and the insurance company has put you on hold four times this week alone, and there is a specific fury in that, worn smooth by repetition, that isn't yours but slots into you anyway, easy as a socket wrench finding its bolt.

You look down without meaning to and the envelope under your palm is warm from your own hand. Claim number. Water damage, unit 4C, a rental he doesn't own and doesn't care about except that the check has to come before the drywall guy shows up Thursday. The shirt against your back — gray, cotton gone soft at the collar from washing — gives you the morning: him standing in the bedroom with the blinds still down, Elena already up and moving somewhere in the house, the shirt pulled over his head in the dark because turning on the light wakes the baby. Sleeve by sleeve, not thinking about it, the way you don't think about breathing. He'd stood at the mirror a second too long after, not vain, just tired, running a palm over the fade he keeps clean himself with clippers on Sunday nights because the barbershop's twenty minutes he doesn't have.

The wedding band on your left hand catches the kitchen light and gives you a wedding — outdoor, June, her sister crying more than she did — and something else underneath it, quieter, a name you weren't looking for: Danielle. High school. A truck bed and a radio and a version of his life that forked somewhere and left her on the other side of it, married now herself, living two exits up I-40, and he thinks of her maybe once a season and always feels a little guilty for it, the way you feel guilty missing weather that's already passed.

Your knees remember concrete — hours of it, kneeling under strangers' sinks, the particular ache that lives in the kneecap and never fully leaves even standing up straight in a kitchen that isn't a jobsite. Your forearms know the memory of a wrench's weight even empty. Somewhere in the house behind you, small and real, a kid's shoe left in a doorway, and the flash that comes with it is simple and complete: a daughter, eighteen months, learning the word for dog before the word for anything else, and him laughing about it on the phone to his own mother two nights ago.

The hold music starts its loop again, tinny in your ear, and you almost laugh at how patient this body is with waiting for things.

You look at your hand — his hand, the ring, the pen still poised on that second digit — and turn it over slow, like checking it's real.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the kitchen, to him.

Somewhere down the line the hold music keeps circling, patient as anything, and you have no idea yet how long you intend to make it wait.