Oscar Benítez

You are standing in Brian Sandoval's kitchen with the refrigerator open, and the light on your forty-year-old forearms is the color of milk. Everyone in the house is asleep. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong with him: he is full. His dimples, his soft belly, the school-lunch lists in the drawer, the whole good tired rhythm of him. None of it wants anything. You open the door and want nothing in there either. Something in you is awake at the hour when only the awake things are, and he cannot be the thing that wants. He is a very comfortable chair. You close the fridge gently, so the children don't wake, and you go to the page with the wheel on it.

You pay. You spin.

You are kneeling. Your knees are pressed into carpet, the thin kind over concrete, and the ache arrives before anything else. Your hands are laced together at the edge of a bed, and you are halfway up from the amen, caught mid-rise with your weight forward. The smile is still on your face. You can feel it, a laugh not finished, and then it falls off your mouth in the middle of a breath and you come back down onto both knees. Your forehead goes to the bedspread. It smells of detergent and of a man who sleeps here alone.

The shirt comes first, because it is against your back. Gray cotton, washed to softness, a little tight across the shoulders. Sleeve by sleeve you are given the morning he put it on, though he wore it only to sleep: a tug at the hem, his thumb finding the thin place at the collar, the thought *this one's done, it can be the praying shirt.* There was no ceremony in it. He was saving the good white ones for work. Under it, a thing you did not ask for, a quiet pride in the clean white ones.

Your palms are pressed flat on the spread, and the calluses are the next door. They are thick at the base of the fingers, hard as boot leather, the right thumb flattened by years of a brush handle. The memory is a room emptied of furniture. Drop cloths, blue tape run along the trim with a thumbnail pressed down along the length, and the sound of a loaded brush, a wet whisper. He cut a line along a ceiling so straight that a client touched it with a fingertip, as if checking it was real. It is the best thing he knows how to do. Your hands already know the angle of it, and they twitch against the bedspread.

The knees complain. Thirty-seven years of them, and eleven hours a day crouched against baseboards. The lower back has a bright, specific complaint of its own. He is short and dense, and he lifts five-gallon buckets as if they were small dogs. You can feel how compact the strength is.

Your thumb finds the bare place on your left ring finger, and there, a woman. Not a picture, a kitchen: her laugh sharp as a dropped plate, her back turned at a sink while he says something that costs him. A signature on paper afterward, and how steady his hand was, and how he hated that it was steady. He still calls her on her birthday. He does not drink, and in the dark behind the memory is the reason: a night he remembers only as a color. He has not touched it since.

Your tongue moves in your mouth and finds the vape taste, sweet and chemical. The little device sits on the nightstand. Under the shame of it is the real comfort of it, a small private smoke at four in the afternoon on the tailgate of the truck, the city going orange.

Then the prayer itself comes up through your folded hands. He was not very serious. He thanked someone for the work, the money in the account that surprised him every time, and asked for nothing in particular. He was almost laughing at himself by the end. *Amen, okay, enough.* It was a habit older than belief, kept like a plant.

You lift your head. The clock on the nightstand glows its green numbers, one in the morning, and the water glass beside it has a ring of dust. You open your hands and turn them over under the lamp. A pale scar splits one eyebrow; you feel it when you frown.

"Well," you say, and his voice comes out low and warm and rough. "Hello, Oscar."

The knees ache. The room is quiet. You wonder whether the wanting will come back tonight, or in a year, or in the time it takes to stand.