Rafael Quiñones

I am in Tom Brewer's kitchen in Ohio, and the coffee has gone cold in his hand for the third time this morning.

It is a Tuesday, mid-morning, and he has nowhere to be until noon. I have had his body for less than a minute, and already I know what's wrong. He is too big. The belly sits against the counter edge and the knees ache on the stairs. His beard itches. His hands are fat-knuckled and slow, and every one of them wants to be somewhere I am not. The wheel gave him to me like a coat that fits a different season. I put the mug down hard enough to slop it. I open the page, and the wheel is already waiting. I pay and I spin.

Then I am standing up, and it is not a kitchen in Ohio.

The counter is cool granite under my left palm. There is a plastic pill organizer under my right hand, one lid still open, a small white capsule between two fingers. A window is full of pale light and grey sea and a turquoise balcony across the way. Neon glows on something wet below. My hand has done something wrong, I can feel it: a compartment skipped, a day put into the wrong slot. I stop. I take the capsule back out. I put it in the right one, slowly, and the lid clicks shut under my thumb.

Then I do the next one. And check it. And the next.

The body is light. That's the first thing. Seventy kilos at most, narrow through the hips, a spring in the calves that Tom never had. My breath goes in clean to the bottom. My scalp feels the air-conditioning at the crown, a cool patch where the hair has thinned. My jaw is rough with three days of stubble. When my mouth shifts, my cheeks fold into two deep creases I can feel without touching.

The jacket is the first thing to open. I push the sleeve and the cuff is soft, washed a hundred times, and I am in a dark bedroom before sunrise, hearing a woman breathe. His wife. He is dressing by the light of a phone. The jacket comes off a hook, one arm then the other. He zips it halfway because the bus is cold. A small child's hand has left a smear of something on the left cuff, and he leaves it there on purpose. The feeling in him is tenderness, and a tiredness older than the morning.

The scrubs next. The cloth sticks at the small of my back and I know the pants: navy, two sizes cheap, the drawstring knotted twice. He bought three sets in a pack and washes them in the sink when the machine is broken. I feel the knees of them. I feel the day he knelt on a client's bathroom floor, a man who could not stand, who wept and apologized, and he said, *no, señor, it's nothing, nothing*, and meant it, and went home and could not eat.

I crack my knuckles. I did not decide to. Both hands, one finger at a time, a small wet pop each, and a calm comes down over his whole frame like a habit of prayer. Under it, another memory: five times a day, a mat, a quiet floor. He prays in the back bedroom of the apartment between two small beds. He prays at a client's too, in the hallway, when the old woman is asleep. A forehead against carpet. A longing in him I could not have named for him.

The ring is on my left hand, plain and a little loose from soap. I turn it with my thumb and a different woman arrives, not his wife. Someone before, only months ago. A car outside a restaurant, her hand flat on the dashboard. *I can't be the one you're not choosing.* He chose. It was the right thing and it still sits in his chest like a swallowed stone. He deletes her messages and does not delete her number.

The belt is the beige strap at my waist, the gait belt. Its buckle is cold against my stomach. It brings the client: Mrs. Alvarado, ninety-one, a hip that has not healed. She grips his forearm and calls him *mijo*, and in the afternoons she tells him which saints to ask. He keeps the pill boxes in rows because her son does not. He checks every slot twice, because once, years ago, a different aide did not.

The tote handle is rough canvas against my knuckles. Inside it, I know without looking, are a stethoscope he never uses, a banana, and a child's drawing folded in four. There is rent, due in nine days. There is a balance on a card that he does not say aloud in the house. The number is small. The love is not.

I stand with all of it still arriving, the stubble, the creases, the lungs. The capsules sit in their rows, and every one is correct.

I lift my right hand off the plastic and turn it over. The palm is dry and quick, the nails clipped to the quick, a ring on the other hand glinting. It is a stranger's hand. It will do whatever I ask.

I look up at the window, at the grey water, and I say, quietly, in his voice, "Okay. Let's see."

Somewhere behind my ribs the wanting is already stirring. I don't know how long this one is mine.