Rigoberto Salcedo

Aaron Sechrist's headset is still warm around your neck when you decide. Ten hours a day for this man's whole sorry stretch of a life, and the shift only just ended, and there is a particular ache in the lower back that belongs to sitting in a mesh chair from eight to six, and a phone on the counter with a text from a daughter who calls him by his first name now instead of Dad, and none of it is unbearable, that's the thing — it's just used up. You have been him less than a minute and you already know the whole shape of the rest of his Thursday: cereal standing at the sink, television, bed. You did not spin the wheel to find that. You get up out of the chair he is still sitting in, walk him to the laptop out of habit more than need, and open vessel.cards with his account still logged in from last time, and you pay, and you spin, because there is a hunger that a comfortable life never touches, and because 874 men were not enough to make 875 feel like too many.

The wheel turns and lands on evening, on Denver, on a rooftop.

You come up into him already tilting his head back down, like gravity remembered you a half-second late. Cool air on a face that isn't gaping open the way Aaron's does — a moustache instead of a slack jaw, a shirt sleeve brushing a wrist, boots instead of loafers. Your eyes are still full of a fading light — something bright dragging itself apart against the dark, going out even as you notice it. His mouth is midway through closing around the last shape of a word. A phone is warm and forgotten in his other hand, screen dark, held loosely like it stopped mattering the second he looked up. You are standing on gravel roofing, a lantern hissing faintly somewhere behind you, and the weight of him settles into your chest all at once — shorter than Aaron by half a foot, dense through the shoulders and arms in a way that has nothing to do with a gym membership, a body built by lifting things for a living rather than choosing to.

The shirt is what opens first — navy, buttoned to the second-to-top, a good shirt, one he does not wear on shift. Sleeve against the forearm and you're in a bedroom this morning — his bedroom, half a bungalow he rents alone off Federal, the porch out front where his mother used to sit before the divorce split everyone's addresses apart, mountains going dark blue behind the roofline while he stood in front of the closet mirror doing the buttons one at a time, deciding, for reasons he could not have said out loud, to look good tonight for no one but himself. Under that: a whole closet of brown polos, the uniform he has wadded into a laundry hamper by the back door, the smell of it — diesel and cardboard and the orange hand-cleaner from the depot — rising up even now underneath the cleaner cotton of tonight's shirt. His hands know a hand truck better than they know almost anything else; they know the particular give of a taped box before you lift it, they know which way a porch step will wobble in this or that zip code, they know how to knock so a dog doesn't lose its mind. Calluses along the base of every finger. A body that has hauled itself up onto roofs before, service ladders, fire escapes, because the view of the mountains from up high is the one thing in this city that has never once disappointed him.

The jeans give you the ex — Marisol, eight months gone from his life and his phone both, a photo he finally deleted last week and regretted by Tuesday. These are the jeans he wore the night he thought he might propose, before he lost the nerve, before she left first, before he understood that the losing of nerve and the leaving were probably the same event seen from two directions. The ache of that is old enough now to be almost sweet, sanded down. He has not told anyone how much he still runs the numbers on what he'd have needed to save to have asked her properly, on this exact income, in this exact economy, in a bungalow he'd have needed to buy instead of rent. He goes to church some Sundays and prays about it in the specific, humiliating way of a grown man asking to be made into someone easier to stay with.

The boots — good leather, bought for occasions, not the sneakers from the depot — bring back nothing dramatic, just the feeling of them going on an hour ago, sitting on the edge of his bed, lacing them with the window open, deciding he wanted, on an ordinary Thursday for no anniversary and no birthday, to come up here and look at the sky like a kid. Thirty-two years old and freckled across the nose like he was twelve. His jaw is already tight — clenched without him noticing, an old habit that lives under everything else he does, the muscle at the hinge of it standing up faintly under the skin even now, even on a rooftop, even wishing. He had just finished saying it. Out loud, to no one, the words already gone by the time you arrive behind his eyes: let me be someone else for a while. Nobody grants those. Something did.

You bring his head down slowly, the way he was already doing, weight settling through a neck two feet shorter than the one you left. You lift his hands — thick fingers, a callus riding the pad of the thumb from years of a scanner gun's trigger, a life's worn workmanship in a body that has never once been used gently by its own owner — and you turn them palm-up in the lantern light like you've never seen a hand do that before.

"Huh," you say, in his voice, which is lower than you expected, and a little rough, like he doesn't use it much when he's alone. "There you are."

Somewhere down below, a city that isn't El Paso hums along without you. You don't know yet if you're a week in this one or an hour. You don't know if the wanting comes back tonight or next spring. You just stand on the gravel with his tight jaw and his wet eyes and his missing girlfriend, and you look up at where the star used to be, and you let that be enough for now.