Rafael Montoya

You are standing in Andre Kittles's post at the mall's east entrance, the flashlight heavy on his belt, when the boredom finally tips over into something worse. It's the middle of the night, Miami quiet outside the glass doors, and you have been him for less than a minute — you can feel his shift stretching out ahead of you, nine more hours of it, his knees already complaining, his radio crackling with nothing. You did not spin four hundred and forty-nine times to stand in a hallway. You want your hands on something. You want to be moving. So you pull the phone from his pocket, the one he keeps for breaks, and you open the page with the wheel on it, and you spin, and Andre Kittles disappears from behind his own eyes without ever knowing there was an behind.

The water is running before you arrive — you feel that first, the cold thread of it hissing against pavement somewhere off to your right, and then the sponge, heavy and wet and slack in your grip. Your hand does something without you: thumb tucks under, wrist turns in small tight circles, and the suds you're pushing across a black car door hold their pattern instead of smearing. You are shorter than you were a second ago, thicker through the middle, standing in a stranger's driveway under a gray sky that has no business being gray at whatever hour this actually is where he lives. Your chest pulls a little when you breathe. You don't know that yet as asthma. You just know the air here tastes different than Miami air, wetter, colder, full of somebody else's block.

The sponge is what starts it. It comes with soap already worked into its pores and it comes with mornings — dozens of them, this same driveway, this same black Honda he loves more than a car should be loved, because his father sold cars in Southwest Detroit for thirty years and never once let Rafael forget what a clean paint job says about a man. There's the smell of dish soap and hose-water and the garage behind you, three-quarters open, dark with tools nobody's touched since his father died. You never met the man and you miss him anyway, for a second, the way Rafael misses him every single day at some low hum underneath everything else.

The hoodie is folded on a porch step off to the side — Minnesota, maroon and gold, and touching it later, when you finally straighten and wipe your palms on your jeans, gives you the morning he put it on: sleeve first, the left one, because that's the arm with the tattoo, the Twins crest inked high near the shoulder the summer he turned twenty, the one time in his life he ever left Michigan for longer than a weekend, a cousin's wedding in St. Paul that turned into three reckless days and a tattoo he never regretted. The backpack strap sits against that same shoulder now in memory though not in the driveway — this morning it's just him, a shirt, a car needing washing before his son's game at eleven, because Rafael doesn't miss those, hasn't missed one in six years, not since the boy could walk.

Your feet remember the porch steps, worn at the edges, and through them comes the man waiting inside — Mateo, asleep right now in a bed the two of them still can't believe they get to share, a wide street of brick houses outside the window, low gray Detroit light coming through blinds they keep meaning to replace. Fourteen years together this spring. Mateo learned to make his mother's menudo from a video call with her, badly, and Rafael ate two bowls anyway and told him it was perfect. There's a wedding photo somewhere in that house, both of them younger, both of them certain, and a boy's height chart penciled inside a closet door that isn't legally either of theirs but is entirely both of theirs.

Your hands go on biting themselves without your permission — you feel the ridge of it, the nails chewed close, an old habit from nursing school applications, from custody paperwork, from every year he spent proving to somebody with a clipboard that he deserved to be called Papi. He is forty-two and back in school for it anyway, a laptop closed right now on a kitchen table with a highlighted textbook beside it, because the degree he wanted at twenty got interrupted by a life that needed living first, and he decided last year that it still counted, that it wasn't too late. Something in your chest — his chest — tightens with pride at that, unprompted, entirely his.

The soap slides down the door in the same wide arc it's made a hundred times, and you feel your shoulder do it the way his shoulder has always known how, older muscle than newer one, the small mole high on your cheek itching faintly the way it always does in the cold. You lift your eyes off the black paint, off your own hand still gripping the sponge like it belongs to you.

"Okay," you say out loud, to the empty driveway, to the closed garage, to nobody. "Okay. Let's finish this."

Somewhere behind that sentence is the wheel, waiting, patient, with no clock on it at all.