Ramón Estrada

You are standing at the back of a stockroom in Denver, in the shoulders of a man named Dennis Kruger, and the thing that sent you back is the quiet. Eleven spins, and this is the first body that gave you nothing to push against. Skinny wrists, blue eyes, a bald scalp you keep rubbing for the grit of it, and an hour and eighteen minutes of a life so orderly it slid off you like water. Inventory counts. A lanyard. A mother who calls at six. You wanted a weight you could feel, and he has none. You lean on the shelf, thumb the site open, and let the wheel start before you can be polite about it.

Then the room goes, and you are sunk.

The couch takes you in at the hips. The dark is heavy and the television is the only light, moving on your face, and the remote lies loose in your right hand. The screen cuts to a bright frame, and you sit up straight, and the remote goes down on the couch arm. You do not know yet that anyone was laughing here a second ago.

The arm of the couch is worn under your palm, nubbed, with a split in the fabric your thumb already knows. Memory comes through it: a Sunday, three kids piled on this cushion, one of them chewing the arm till it tore, and you, him, laughing and not even angry. The fabric is warm with a love so tired it hurts.

The T-shirt is soft and thin against your belly. It has been washed a hundred times. This morning, before light, his hands pulled on the flannel over it, one sleeve and then the other, rolling the cuffs twice, and the buttons were cold. Behind that, the diesel smell of a truck stop and coffee burned on a plate. He is a driver. The lower back knows it before you do, a bright old ache at the base of the spine, and the knees complain when you shift. Forty-eight years of sitting.

Your socks are damp at the heel. The floor under them is old wood, and something comes up through it: the brownstone stoop in rain, the sodium light, a woman's laugh on the steps. Her name is Marisol, and he is nervous about her in a way he has not said aloud to anyone. A ring is not in his pocket yet. The money is, though, a heavy dread of numbers, a house owing more than it is worth. He crosses himself in the dark sometimes, over the bills, and means it.

Your belly is soft and warm under your forearm. The moustache lifts when you breathe out. Your hands are short and thick, with calluses along the palms from the wheel and straps, and they know how to hold a steering wheel, a child, a rosary.

You lift them into the television light and turn them over. They are brown and scarred by work, and they are yours for now.

"Okay," you say, low, in his voice, a gravel you did not choose. "Okay. Hello."

Somewhere under it the question is already waiting: how long, and when the wanting comes back.