Ramón Escobedo

You are tired of Lionel Peoples, and you cannot say it was his fault. His back is fine. His knees are fine. You have stood in his kitchen in Phoenix for three minutes with the whole house asleep, drinking his water, and the cleft in his chin keeps catching on the rim of the glass. Fifty years of quiet came with him. Nobody in the house would wake and call you by his name. That is the whole trouble. The gate was open, and you went through it, and the room on the other side was just another room. So you open the page with the wheel, and your thumb is already steady.

It turns, and the kitchen goes.

You are on your knees. Carpet presses through thin cloth into both kneecaps, a dull ache that has been there a while. Your hands are loosely together, and the left one is warm against the right. The amen is still in your mouth, a little laugh with it, and you are already pushing up to stand. Halfway up, you stop. Something in you does not want the rest of the rise. You come back down onto both knees, and the smile goes out of the face mid-breath. Your forehead drops to the bedspread. It smells of detergent and a faint cold dust. The green clock on the nightstand says 12:30.

The t-shirt is soft from washing, thin at the collar. Touching it at your throat, you get a flash that is his and not yours: a morning, the shirt pulled over his head in the dark, one arm and then the other, his wife's shape asleep under the blanket, and a feeling of tender, ordinary guilt that he was leaving her warm.

The bedspread under your forehead gives you more. A hotel bed, white sheets, the corners tucked tight. His hands know the fold before you do. Hospital corners, snap, smooth. Forty rooms of it, and the small private pride that no guest ever sees. The cart waits in a doorway. His shoulders remember the weight of the mattress lifted with one knee. A mean supervisor once, years ago. A bad month. He took it quietly, and the quiet cost him.

The wedding band is cool and slightly loose on your left hand. It brings her: a kitchen, her laughing at something he said badly, the snow ticking against the window. And behind her, folded small and kept a long time, an older girl, an old girlfriend, a name he has never said aloud to his wife. It is not a wound. It is a drawer he opens once a year and shuts.

Your knees ache. Your belly sits soft over strong legs. Your scalp feels the cold air along the receding temples. The prayer is still in your throat, half-hearted and sincere, a habit he keeps because it is his mother's, and his.

You lift your head. You turn your hand over and look at it: the ring, the knuckles, the blunt, capable fingers of a man who makes beds for a living. Then you look up, and into the dark window, the face is a stranger's and yours.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is not quite yours yet. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

The clock says 12:31. You do not know yet whether you will still be here when it changes.