Marcos Villanueva

Danny Pruitt's hands smell like somebody else's cardboard, and that's the first thing you notice sitting in the cab outside a Ralphs, engine idling, phone propped on the wheel. Thirty-six years old, a body that clocks in and clocks out and doesn't ask you anything. You liked him fine for fifty-nine spins' worth of men. But sixteen minutes ago you were Alan Oshiro — fifty-three, silver hair, a badge you didn't earn and a house in Kaimukī you walked through like a museum — and in that minute, standing in his front hall with his own gun in a lockbox you knew the combination to without trying, you felt something that isn't boredom and isn't greed, though it looks like both from outside: you felt like you'd left a door open on somebody. Alan wanted a man. You know this because for sixty seconds you were the wanting itself, sitting in Alan's chest like a stone that had been there for years, aimed at a name — Marcos — that came with a warehouse and a dinner and a green light on a stove clock. You gave the body back to the wheel before you could do anything with what you knew. Now, in the cab, Danny's blond eyebrows draw together over green — no, brown, Danny's are brown — eyes, and you open the app again.

You do not decide with words. You spin.

The stirring stops mid-circle in a kitchen that smells like garlic and gas flame, and starts again the other way.

You are shorter now, and wider through the shoulders, weight sitting low and solid in a body that has spent years being asked to lift things and answering yes. Bare feet on cool vinyl. A wooden spoon warm in your fist. Steam off a pan of something with rice in it, one plate already set on the counter to your left, chipped at the rim. You salt the pan without tasting it — his hand does it before you catch up to why — and then you're reaching into the cabinet and your fingers, his fingers, find a second plate and it comes down and sets itself beside the first with a small clean clack, and you don't know yet that you did that for a woman who isn't coming.

The shirt is what opens first — gray, soft from wash, tag scratching a half-inch of skin at the back of the neck — and it gives you a Tuesday, cold for Detroit even by Detroit standards, him pulling it over his head in a bedroom with a mattress on a frame and no headboard, sun barely up, the smell of his own sleep still on the pillow. He'd stood in front of the closet a second too long deciding, which was stupid, because nobody at Ferro Logistics cares what you wear under the vest. He picked it anyway because Priya used to say it brought out something in his eyes, and some nights the habit outlives the reason for it by months. She's six weeks gone now — not dead, just gone, back to her sister's in Redford with a U-Haul he helped load because what else do you do, stand there and not help — and his hands still ache sometimes reaching for a second coffee mug he no longer needs, the way they just reached, on their own, for a second plate.

The sweatpants are older, drawstring gone soft and gray from a hundred washes, and they carry the warehouse into the kitchen without asking — twelve-hour shift, RF scanner strapped to a forearm that's gone numb at the wrist from the weight of it, aisle 14, pallet after pallet, a forklift's beeping laugh track running under every hour of his day. His body knows exactly how to bend at a rack without hurting his back anymore, four years teaching it the one lesson it needed. He is strong in the particular way of men who lift for money and not for mirrors — thick through the forearms, a gut that says he eats like someone's watching even when no one is, freckles scattered like they don't know that's not a Detroit face, that's a face that belongs somewhere with more sun than this city gets in November.

The floor under his bare feet remembers a dad who left when Marcos was nine and a mother who worked two jobs and taught him to cook the one dish he's making right now, arroz con algo, whatever's in the fridge — and how he learned, late, twenty-two or twenty-three, lying next to a guy named Theo for one strange perfect summer, that wanting men and wanting women could sit in him at the same time without either one apologizing to the other. Theo's gone the way people from a summer go. Priya's gone the way people from three years go, which hurts worse and slower. Neither of them is who the second plate was for tonight — nobody is, that's the whole small tragedy of it, muscle just doing what it used to do, his jaw already tightening, clenching down on nothing, the way it does when he isn't thinking about it, a habit with no fight left to spend on.

The spoon is still in your — his — hand. Warm wood, worn smooth at the thumb's place.

You look at the hand holding it. Turn it, slow, the way you always do, checking it like it might not hold.

Then you lift your eyes to the window over the sink, black glass throwing the kitchen light back at you, and past your own reflection you say, out loud, to no one:

"Okay. Let's see what he wanted you for."