Mateo Alvarado Ruiz

You are standing in Gordon Haskins's kitchen with the kettle just starting to tick, and you have been him for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong. His knees. A groundskeeper's knees, sixty-one years of kneeling to edge beds and bend over rakes, and the first thing he does with a morning is announce them. The beard itches. The freckled hands that hold the mug are slow to close. You wanted a man who could run, and you were handed a man who remembers running. Through the window the Sunday is gray and wet and enormous, the Seattle kind of quiet, and you stand there thinking that you paid for this, and that it is not enough. You set the mug down hard. The phone is already open to the wheel.

Then it turns, and you are lying on your side in a bar of white heat.

The foil has peeled at one corner and the light lies across your face like a hand you did not feel arrive. You turn from it. You turn back, because something in you wants it, and you open the eyes and hold them open against the glare without blinking until the burning is only a fact. Brown eyes. Water gathers and does not fall.

Boots on your feet, still laced. That is the first thing that tells you anything. The leather has gone hot and tight around the ankles, and the pressure of them opens a door. Four in the morning, the dock, the trailer mouth gaping at you, and a stack of boxes to the height of your chin that you walk into the dark one by one. Your back remembers the counting. Forty to a row. You carry a number in your head like a prayer so your mind can leave while your arms stay.

The work trousers are stiff at the knee with dried grime and the cloth drags when you shift your leg. They give you a different morning: the closet floor, the same pair pulled up off the heap because laundry is a thing for the weekend that never comes, the belt cinched a notch tighter than last month. Money. Rent due. A figure in your head that is smaller than the figure you need. Your jaw tightens, and you feel the muscle bunch under the stubble and understand it is something you do, not something you decided. You clench it now. You let it go.

The sweatshirt is rough and gray at the cuffs, pilled where the pallet jack handle rubs. When your forearm moves, a flash: your mother's kitchen, a Sunday, the radio low, a rosary hanging off the cabinet knob and her voice saying you do not have to carry everything. You said you did. You said it kindly. You have gone to Mass maybe four times since, and each time you stood at the back by the door, and each time it was her you were standing for.

The mattress under you has no frame. It sags toward the middle, and the sagging gives you the little room, the radiator that knocks, the stairs between the backyards where you cut home in the evening, concrete slick with wet leaves and the sun low and orange behind the houses. Nobody waits at the top of them. You liked that and did not like it, both, most nights, and a beer or two on a Friday with the guys from the dock made it a little easier to hold.

Your shoulders ache in the good way, the way of lifted weight. The stomach is empty. The hair lies heavy on your neck, damp with sleep, and you push it back with a hand that already knows how.

You lift the hand into the light. The palm is hard across the base of the fingers, yellowed with calluses, a crease of black in the lines that no soap has ever finished. You turn it over. The fingers close, strong and quick and entirely unlike the slow ones you left, and you laugh once, breathless, at the ceiling and then at the window.

"Twenty-two," you say, and the voice comes out low and rough with sleep. "Okay. Okay, you'll do."

The light is still on your face. Somewhere a pallet jack is waiting for a man who is not coming. You flex the hand again and wonder how long this one lasts, whether the wanting stays quiet past tonight, whether you wake up as him.