Mateo Arriaga

Your thumb is on the trigger of a pipe wrench that isn't there. It's the middle of a Thursday morning in Atlanta, and the plumber you are, thirty-five, bald by razor, goatee, blue eyes, dimples, has been standing in a stranger's kitchen for less than a minute. The sink is already open. The water's off. Someone's voice is saying "so what do you think?" from the doorway, and what you think is that you have nothing to do with this man's pipes.

He worked fine. That's the trouble. His knees were good and his back was good and the dimples did what dimples do. Nothing was wrong with him except that the wanting came up in the middle of a sentence, the way it always does. It was a sentence about a P-trap. You said "give me a second," walked out to the truck, and opened the page with the wheel on it. You paid. Your hand, his hand, was steady.

Now it spins.

You are standing at the foot of a bed. Cold white light comes through the window and lies across a wood floor, and the weight is different, shorter and denser, all of it packed close. Your hand is flat on your chest. Under the cloth there are ribs, and under the ribs a heart going fast, because the last thing he knew was a button. The shirt is wrong by one. The tie hangs loose on either side of your neck.

The buttons come undone under your fingers and go back up in the right order. The tie finds itself into a knot he never learned, one the closet has never seen. It is still happening when it is already done.

Then the shirt starts talking.

It is cotton, soft at the cuffs, the color of dishwater. The cuff against your wrist opens an afternoon. He is standing in a driveway, steep, cut into the hill, with a clipboard, looking at a car pocked all over by hail. The homeowner is crying a little about a deductible. His eye drifts, the left one wandering off toward the garage door while the right one stays on her, and he has learned to say "I'm listening, I promise," because people think the eye means he isn't. He is kind to her. He writes the number higher than his supervisor would like. You feel the small clean warmth of that, not yours.

The belt buckle is cool against your stomach. Something comes up through it: his wife in the kitchen below the bay window, the garage that was never meant to be a home, laughing about the drafts. Her hair is in her mouth. She has her hand in his back pocket while he tries to make coffee. He is so entirely happy that it hurts you, a stranger, standing in it.

The ring is a plain band, warm now. You turn it with your thumb and feel another woman, from before, an old girlfriend, her name coming up like a bubble and breaking before you can read it. A song in a car. He still thinks about her on certain streets and doesn't tell his wife, not because it matters, but because it is the one room that is only his. It was only his.

The floor is cold through the socks. Under that, the body: five foot six, dense and strong through the shoulders and thighs. A gym habit, a morning habit. A dull ache lives behind the left knee. The jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and the air touches it like a question. His hair is a soft dark cloud and you lift a hand to it, and the hand already knows how.

Money is in him too, a feeling and not a number: a savings account he checks late at night, the small proud arithmetic of a man who has put a little away. He doesn't pray. He never did. He has no one to ask for anything, and nothing is being asked of him now.

You lift both hands and look. The knuckles are broad, the wedding band is bright, and the skin is a shade you have never worn. You turn them over. Palms. Lines that were his and are only lines now.

You look up at the window, where the day is arriving without him.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is lower and quieter than the one you came in with. "Okay. Hello."

And under it, patient as the white light on the floor, is the question you can't answer: how long this one holds, and when the wanting comes.