Ramón Escalante

You are leaving Hector Villanueva because of the dog.

It is a small reason. It is Tuesday afternoon in Eastern Kentucky, and you are standing in his kitchen with his coffee going cold in his hand. A neighbor's beagle has been yodeling at the fence for an hour. You keep reaching for the thing Hector's body knows how to do about it, and it won't come. Hector would have gone out and said something easy over the fence, and the dog would have quieted, and the man would have waved. You stand there with his chinstrap itching and his short legs planted and no idea how he did it. Forty-one years of being liked, and none of it came with the body. You have been him for under a minute, and you are already tired of being a stranger in somebody's good life.

So you open the page with the wheel on it. Your thumb knows where to press, because it is the 1335th time. You spin.

Streetlight, thin and yellow, through a gap in the curtains. You are face-down. The sheets are wound around one leg and your cheek is pressed into the pillow. Your breath is ragged, a snore catching on its own edge. One arm hangs off the mattress, heavy as a sandbag, the blood gone out of it. Then the breath evens out. The arm draws itself up and you roll onto your back. Your hands fold on your chest. You have never slept like this, and you know it without knowing how.

The room smells of cheap carpet and old laundry, and under that something sweet and brown, tobacco and mint. Your tongue finds it first, a flat pouch of dip pressed behind the lower lip. Not in. Just the taste that lives in the mouth. Your tongue also finds a gap between the front teeth, and it keeps going back there to test the space.

The T-shirt is what opens first. It is navy, thin at the collar and shrunk from a hundred washes, and it is rucked up over a belly that is warm and soft and sits easy on you. A woman's voice comes with the cotton. She is laughing, in Spanish and bad English together, saying *you wear it till it's a rag, Ramón.* A small pair of arms is around his neck. The shirt smells of her kitchen. Then it is gone. Ramón. He is Ramón.

Under your folded hands the wedding band is a thin cold line, and you turn it with your thumb. It is plain gold, worn flat on one side. Nobody gave him a fancy one. He put it on in a church basement in a borrowed tie, and the sweat was running down his ribs, and he couldn't stop grinning. The gap showed. She told him later it was the reason she said yes. She said it looked like he had nothing to hide.

The mattress is hard and the pillow is wrong, a hotel kind. The cuffs of your sweatpants are damp at the ankle. Somewhere in the room is the backpack, and you know the weight of it before you see it. In the bag are two phone chargers and a framed drawing, a crayon house with a sun, folded flat so the glass wouldn't break. You can feel him thinking of it, a small hard ache in the chest, under the hands.

Your right forearm itches. The skin there is thick with old color and the lines have gone soft. An anchor, a rose. He got the anchor at nineteen, drunk and sure of things. The rose came later, for his mother, and the needle hurt worse than he'd said. His back aches in one low, particular place. It is the ache of ten hours in a seat, the kidneys, the knees. Your calves are tight. Your hair is thick on top and thin at the temples, and when you drag a palm across your forehead the skin goes back farther than you expected.

The knowledge arrives in the hands themselves. They know the shape of a steering wheel, the lift of a fifth-wheel pin, the tap of a tire iron down a row of duals. They know how to hold a rosary of keys and how to fold a bill into a pocket. Church comes with them, a plastic folding chair and a voice singing off-key beside him. He prays in the cab at four in the morning, out loud, a little ashamed, with the heater ticking.

You lift your hands. They are broad and brown, the knuckles scarred pale, the nails square and clean. The ring catches the light from the gap in the curtains. You turn them over once, slowly. Somewhere a man named Hector Villanueva is standing in a kitchen, and you do not have to be him anymore.

You look up, into whatever is looking back.

"Okay," you say, and the voice is low and rough with sleep, a stranger's gravel in your own mouth. "Okay, Ramón. Let's see how long you last."