Mateo Villaseñor

You are in Bryce Holloway's kitchen in Houston, and the reason is the refrigerator. It hums a half-note flat, and for three weeks you have been listening to it as if it owed you something. Twenty-three days and twenty hours in a man who can lift a rebar bundle and cannot stand to be alone in a quiet room. His belly rests against the counter. His knee hurts on the stairs. On Thursday his sister called, and you answered in his voice, and she cried and said he sounded like himself again. That was the worst thing anyone has said to you. You open the page. The wheel sits there, patient, and your thumb, his thumb, knows exactly where to go.

Then the highway. Dark, the road slick and humming under the tires, a green dash glow on your knuckles, ten and two. The car drifts a foot toward the line and you pull it back in one smooth motion. Your hands leave the wheel and settle lower and wider, where they feel right to you. Your thumb finds the signal stalk and it ticks, ticks, for an exit that isn't his.

Three miles from home, you think, and you don't know how you know. The jacket comes first, canvas gone soft, a collar worn to felt against the neck. Your fingers close on the cuff and a morning opens that isn't yours. A small bedroom, a woman's back turned to him, the zipper he pulled up one-handed because the other hand held coffee. His right arm goes into the sleeve, then the left. She said, you'll be late, and he said, I'm never late, only careful. The tenderness in it is so ordinary it makes your throat close.

The ring is on the wheel rim, a thin band against the leather, and your thumb turns it without being told. Round and round. Memory: a pawnshop on Magazine Street, the scrape of a velvet tray, two hundred and eleven dollars he didn't have. Wedding day, a courthouse, her laughing at his borrowed tie. Then another woman, older in the memory, a different year, a platform and a train, and him not running after it. The woman who got away. He never told his wife how often he still takes that picture out of his head and develops it.

Your jeans are stiff at the knee. The shoes are thin-soled, and every seam in the road comes up through the pedal. His back aches in a young man's way, a bruise of long days. You are small in this seat; the wheel sits close, the mirror a little high. His hands are quick and sure. They know apertures and the cold weight of a lens, the little click of a reflector's frame locking. They know sunlight leaning on a wet street in the Marigny, a tin-roofed shotgun house, a month of rent he's behind on and a number in his head he never says aloud. Brown stubble itches along the jaw. A mole on his cheek that he hates in photographs.

The exit slides up green in the headlights. You hold the signal on.

You lift one hand and look at it. The band, the knuckles, the pale line where a camera strap rides. You turn it over. Then you raise your eyes to the mirror, to the stranger with braids and a mole, and you say, quietly, "Hello, Mateo."

The signal keeps ticking. How long is he yours? You don't know. Already, far down in the quiet, something in you is beginning to ask again.