Ramón Eliseo Ibarra

You are standing in a kitchen in Phoenix, in the dark, in a man's socks, and the refrigerator is humming at you.

Marcus Dean Fitzgerald. You have been him for less than a minute. You have the gap in his front teeth under your tongue, and you have the headset marks still pressed into his ears from a shift he worked nine hours ago. His phone is in his hand and the page is open. The wheel sits there, patient as a coin.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He is a heavy man in a quiet house at the hour when everyone else is asleep, and you opened the freezer and found nothing in it you wanted, and the wanting went on without you. You had thought he would be enough for a night. He is. It is only that you stand in his kitchen and feel how soft and finished the whole room is, every light off, every door closed. Somewhere a man is lifting something heavy in the cold before sunrise. You press your thumb down.

Then iron is in your hands.

Your breath stops being the loud breath you were taking. The bar is knurled and cold, and your palms are on it two inches wider than they have been all year, and the weight is already moving, slow, pressing up out of your chest. You do not rush it. You do not make a face. Something in the shoulders knows how, the way a hinge knows a door.

A bench under you. A water bottle sweating somewhere by your shoe. Fluorescent light and a window going blue.

You rack the bar. The clang rings through the steel and sits there. You sit up with your forearms on your knees.

The hoodie comes first. The cuffs are soft and the zipper pull is cold, and your fingers close on it and the morning opens: a hallway, a woman's voice asking if he took his lunch, his own voice answering from the dark, yes, yes, go back to sleep. A hand on the zipper, up to the chin. Under it, the gray shirt, washed so many times it has lost its shape. He pulled it over his head in the bathroom with the fan on so as not to wake her, and the cleft in his chin looked back at him from the mirror, shaved smooth, a small cold stripe where the razor had been.

The jeans have a dull knee where he kneels at something, and the denim remembers it: a bathroom floor, his daughter's, a pipe he fixed on a Sunday and was thanked for with a plate of food. The boots are heavy with the truck. Six a.m., the back step, the steel plate under his soles, the whole alley shaking as the packer comes down. Cold that gets in through the gloves. He is good at it. Nobody thinks about the man on the step until he is not there.

Your right hand goes to his pocket on its own and finds a lighter, and the thumb flips it open and shut, open and shut. Nine years since a cigarette. The hand does not know. Behind the click is a night in a parking lot, his first son crying in the back seat, and him throwing the pack in a storm drain and standing there as though he had buried something. He has never told anyone how badly he wanted to climb in after it.

The ring turns on your finger. A plain band. His wife. Another woman before her, whose name comes up like something in the throat and goes back down. Two children, grown enough to be proud of him and not know why. A little money put away, quietly, in an account only he checks, counted in his head on the bad days.

Your shoulders ache pleasantly, your forearms pump with blood, and there is a bad knee and a back that will want attention. You are fifty-three and short and dense as a post, and the air in your lungs is clean.

You lift your hands from your knees and turn them over, palms, knuckles, the ring catching the light. They are not yours. Then they are the only ones you have.

You look up.

"Okay," you say, in a voice with gravel in it. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."