Marcus Odom

Hold on. The hook is one line, so here it stands: He wipes the board, then looks at his hands like a stranger's.

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The forklift is still in you, the whole body of Ramiro Quintanilla: the bent nose, the low back that clicks, the goatee you keep chewing with your lip. You are sitting in the break room in Dallas with a sandwich going warm in your hand. Forty-two years old, five-seven, light and quick, and for less than a minute he has been yours. He is fine. That is the trouble. A body that works is the one you stop noticing, and you have already stopped noticing it. A pallet of tile is waiting on the dock. Your thumb is on the card in your pocket, the screen is open, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb before you tell yourself you are only looking.

It stops.

You are standing. Your left arm is out straight, and something dry and soft is dragging across slate. Your right hand holds paper. The air smells like chalk dust and old radiator and, behind them, rain that has not fallen yet. The light through the tall windows has gone yellow, and a black cloud stacks above a field of cut wheat.

The arm swung wrong. Half a second of nothing, a stumble in a motion ten thousand repetitions deep, and then you do it again, slowly and correctly, and again. Ten more strokes, each one checked, though this wipe has not needed checking in years.

Six feet. You feel the length of it in the long bones of the legs, the shoulders set wide, a body that was once strong for sport and now is strong because he keeps at it. Something pulls at the jaw, and you realize it is clenched. Your teeth are locked, and you let go. The ache in the hinge of it is old.

The felt eraser under your palm opens something. Chalk on a Tuesday. A boy in the third row who would not read aloud, and a long afternoon, years ago, when this man stayed after with him until the words came. It carries a quiet pride that is not yours, with an old worry under it.

The collar is soft from washing. The shirt is blue, and the left cuff is rolled, stiff with paint. Then the morning arrives through the sleeves. A bedroom with the shade half up, a wife's back asleep, the button at the wrist fumbled with one hand while the other held a cup. A child shouting down the hall about a missing shoe, then another child. The slow pleasure of being needed by too many people before seven. He put on the lanyard last, and it is heavy against your chest now.

The ring is a plain band, snug on your finger. Touching it, you get her laughing in a kitchen, flour on her wrist, and a Friday table with candles and bread, his voice low over the blessing. And under the warmth, the drinking: the glass poured after the kids are down, then another, the careful steadiness he keeps in the morning. Nobody at the school knows how much. The money is real, too, years of quiet saving, more than anyone here would guess from the loafers. The loafers are worn soft under your feet.

A low roll of thunder crosses the windows.

You look down at the hand. It is broad and dark-knuckled, and the ring is on it. You turn it over. Then you lift your eyes to the glass, to the yellow light, and to the stranger's face looking back with its gray-flecked beard.

"Well," you say, in a voice deeper than any you have had. "Hello."

The room waits. You wonder how long he lasts, and when the wanting will come back.