Mario Salcedo

Greg Lindqvist's knees hurt. That is the whole reason, and I would never say it to anyone. Forty-five and five-foot-five, and every time I kneel in a client's flower bed the left one clicks like a pen. For less than a minute I have been him, and in that minute I have already learned that the world is a shelf I cannot reach. Gravel in my glove. Blond hair on my forearms, thin and pale. The truck is warm, the morning is clean and high over Denver, and I am sitting in it with the site open on the phone, the wheel waiting, and I think: taller. Just taller. Once, I want to look down at a room.

I press it.

The pan is in my left hand, and the stirring stops mid-circle because I have arrived in the middle of it. A wooden spoon is in my right. Steam hits my face from a long way below where my face was a second ago. The floor is farther off. The ceiling is closer. Something wide sits across my shoulders like a yoke I did not know I was carrying.

My wrist starts the spoon again, the other way. I did not tell it to. I salt the pan with two fingers and do not taste it, and the habit is in the hand, not in me. Then I reach up, and the cabinet door is already there at chest height, and I take down a second plate. I set it beside the first one on the counter. I don't know why. My hand knew, and I let it.

The shirt is a gray tee gone soft with washing, and it clings at the back where the heat of the stove has found it. It gives me a morning. His fingers working a button on a navy work shirt in a dark bedroom, the sleeves rolled twice, the small pride of getting both cuffs even. Then a hallway, an open ladder, a ceiling panel pushed up and the smell of wet insulation. Somebody's leak. He liked finding it. That was the best part of his day, the moment the thing stopped being a mystery.

The jeans are stiff at the knee, and the denim gives me her. A woman at a parking-lot curb, years back, the air thick as a wet towel at dusk, the neon of a strip mall humming over them. She is saying his name like a door closing. Mario. His jaw locks now, in this body, hard, the muscle jumping under the short beard. I feel it and don't unclench it. The woman who got away has been sitting in his jaw for years.

The counter edge presses my hip, and it hands me the pile of envelopes in the drawer under it, which he never opens in order. The number on the bank letter is a sinking weight in the stomach, a house worth less than the loan on it, a hundred thousand and more under the water. He says it to no one. He goes to Mass anyway, Sundays, stands in the back because his head clears the pews, and asks for nothing. Only that it hold.

The linoleum is cool through his socks. His calves are long, strong, and a little tired. The bald head sweats in the steam. My ribs are wide and my breath is slow. The hands already know the pan, the heat, the exact moment the onions turn.

There is a girlfriend. I feel it in the second plate. She is coming, or he hoped she was, or he sets it out every night to make the evening a rehearsal for her. I can't tell which. His feeling has no edges.

I put the spoon down. I turn my hand over. It is huge, brown, and nicked across the knuckles, with a callus at the base of every finger, and it is mine for now.

I lift my eyes to the window, which is white with noon.

"Tall," I say, low, and the voice rolls up from somewhere deep. "Okay."

The pan hisses. I wonder how long before I want something else, and whether I'll still be standing in this kitchen when I do.