Marcos Reyna

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Eighteen minutes is not long enough to learn a mop closet, let alone a man. You know Travis Denbo's hands only by what they do without asking — the way they've already learned to snap a trash bag open with one flick before you've told them to — and you know his mouth by what it tastes like, which is somebody else's cigarettes gone stale on somebody else's tongue. You are standing in a supply closet off a casino floor in Las Vegas, mid-morning light nowhere near this room, fluorescent tubes humming the same note they'll hum all day. Dimples. Blue eyes he never once uses to look at anything for longer than it takes to clean it. Eighteen minutes was enough to know this is not a life, it's a wait. You did not spin again out of hunger for something better. You spun again because Travis Denbo, twenty-eight, is the kind of body that makes the wanting come back fast — nothing in his hands worth keeping them still for. So you set the mop against the shelf, the same shelf it's leaned on ten thousand times before you touched it, and you go back to the page with the wheel on it, and you spin.

The board on the wall clicks from 47 to 48.

His knee stops bouncing on the same click, mid-air almost, like the number startled it still. You are sitting down before you know you are sitting, weight settled low and solid through both feet flat on cheap linoleum, and there is a paper cup warm-going-lukewarm between two hands that are not the hands you had a half-second ago — thicker through the knuckle, a callus riding the base of each finger, freckles scattered loose across the backs like something thrown from a distance. You set the cup down square on the seat beside your thigh without deciding to. You fold your hands. Somewhere close a receptionist calls a name — not this one — and you do not look up, because some reflex older than you is not answering to anyone yet.

Denim against your knees, worn soft at a spot you can feel is where a knee has bent this exact way a thousand times. A brown shirt collar snug at your throat, buttoned one higher than you'd have done it. And the jacket — denim, dark, gone through a hundred washes to a color that used to be blue — you didn't put it on, but your arms remember it going on this morning, sleeve over sleeve, a fast two-handed motion done without looking in any mirror because there wasn't one close, just the visor flipped down in a truck cab, sun already flat and mean through the windshield at six-forty. Marcos. That's the shape the memory comes in first, not a name spoken but a name worn — the shirt tag scratching a half inch of skin it's scratched for two years, and under that, an ache set deep in both shoulders that isn't pain exactly, more like a held note, the specific tiredness of a body that has spent this year putting other people's furniture into other people's trucks. A couch stood on its end at a curb in the smell of cut grass and hot asphalt. The strap of a moving harness biting a line into one shoulder that the muscle has built itself around. His hands know, before you do, how to test a doorway's width with a glance, how to walk backward down a ramp without turning to check it. They do this without you.

The paper cup gives you almost nothing — water somebody poured for him from a cooler by the door, going warm because he hasn't wanted it, only held it, because holding it is easier than sitting with hands empty. But the jacket keeps giving. A Friday two winters back, an ex-girlfriend's name arriving with no face at first and then a whole kitchen — her back to him at a stove, an argument that had already been lost before either of them raised a voice, the particular quiet after she said his name like a period at the end of something. You feel where that quiet still sits in him, low, worn smooth by now, not sharp anymore, just there, the way a scar isn't pain but is still weather. No one since her that mattered enough to leave a mark this deep. A pack of cigarettes somewhere on him — not touching your hand yet, but the memory of the first one each morning arrives anyway, riding shotgun with the smell soaked into the denim: he doesn't smoke in the truck, he smokes at the curb before he loads, before the sun's all the way up, watching traffic not move yet.

The waiting room itself starts giving too, now that you're sitting still enough to notice it giving — the disinfectant smell under the strip light, the particular exhaustion of a body that got here on a lunch break it isn't sure it'll get paid for. He doesn't know why he's here beyond the ordinary reason a grown man ends up third seat from the door with a number in his hand, some appointment nobody would think twice about, and you don't chase it further, because it isn't the thing the shirt or the jacket or the cup wants to tell you. What they want to tell you is smaller and realer: Sunday Mass with his mother two weeks running, her hand patting his forearm afterward like checking a shelf was still level. A big night at a bar off Westheimer once or twice a month, the kind that ends with him laughing too loud at something not that funny. The specific ease of his hand rising, unbidden, to run itself once over the short hair at his scalp — an old tell, a settling gesture, no different now than the last thousand times he's done it without noticing.

The board clicks to 49. Somewhere a chair creaks as someone else stands up for a name that isn't his and was never going to be.

You look down. Two hands, backs freckled, one still faintly gray with dust that didn't come from any waiting room — dust from a couch's underside, from a truck bed, from a life this morning already had before it sat down here and waited for a number that will never get called for him now. You turn the right one over slow, palm up, and the callus at the base of the thumb catches the strip light.

"Okay," you say, quiet, mostly to the hand. "Okay."

You don't look up right away. When you do, it's not toward the door where the names keep getting called.