Mateo Salazar

You are Trevor Dunleavy, and he has been yours for four minutes, and already you are bored of the way he stands. It is early. The showroom is dark and you are alone in it with a coffee he made too sweet, and your thumb is on the glass of a phone he never locks. Twenty-two years old, and everything he wants is a number on a board. You wanted to be wanted. Instead you are wanted for a quota. The car on the floor smells of new plastic, and you smell it and feel nothing at all. You press the wheel. You do not decide. It is only that the pressing was already happening.

Then rain.

It is on your face before anything else, cold and steady, and your hood is falling back off your head, pushed by your own hand. You have stepped out from under the shelter a beat early. The runoff is over your boots. Your face is tilted up into the water and you are not turning out of it. The board behind you says 3 MIN in orange. You are standing in the wet like a man who has not been cold in a long time, and you were not, but he was, and now it is yours.

The jacket first. The slick shell of it is heavy with water, and its collar touches your jaw, and something comes up through it unasked: a hook by a door, a cold hallway, his arm going into the left sleeve first because the right shoulder aches in the morning. He zipped it halfway and stopped, thinking about the bus. That is his feeling, not yours: a plain worry about being on time, about the foreman, about the wall.

The hoodie under it is soft at the cuffs. You push your thumb into the cuff and there is a kitchen, a small one, a pot, a radio low. He pulled this on over the gray work shirt, the one he keeps for dust. Mortar dries in the seams of his knuckles; you feel it as a tightness, a lifetime of it.

The beard, close along the jaw. You touch it and get a mirror, a razor, his own steady patience. The locs are heavy and wet against your neck, and when you tuck one behind your ear your hand does it as if it has done this ten thousand times. Then the tic: your throat clears, hard, and your eyes squeeze shut once and open. It is his. You did not choose it.

Under the sleeve, high on the arm, the old ink prickles in the cold. Black tribal lines. A friend with a machine in a garage, a summer, a laugh. A lot of years ago. You do not know the friend's name. You know only that he was loved.

The boots are soaked and the soles remember the scaffold: the give of planks, the bounce of a ladder, the exact width of a foot on a narrow edge. Your legs are athletic and quick, and your back carries a day before the day has started. In your pocket your fingers find keys, and there is a snowmobile under blue tarp, plywood behind it, the long amber light of a late shift in the yard. A medal on the keyring: a saint, worn smooth. His mother pressed it into his palm. He quit drinking in the spring. He goes to Mass sometimes, standing at the back, and the saying of the words is what holds him. No one waits for him at home. The quiet there is not terrible. It is just his.

The rain runs into your mouth. You taste metal and cold.

You lift your hand out of the water and look at it. Broad palm, a callus at the base of each finger, a thin line of gray in the creases that no washing takes out. It turns over in the orange light. It is steady. It is not yours.

You look up. The bus lights are coming through the rain.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected, and warm. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."