Rodrigo Palomares

The Miami man is still on you, and you are sick of him. Leonard Bascombe's knees ache on the kitchen tile at this hour. Down the hall his wife's shoes sit by the door, and she is still a stranger to you. The plant calls his phone and you let it ring out. For fifty-five spins you could do anything with a body and stop there. Tonight, in a man who runs a whole floor, you opened his garage and found nothing in it you wanted. Nobody sent you but the quiet. You open the page and the wheel is already turning.

The hose is running and you are bent over a car door. Your arm is out, a yellow sponge is in your fist, and soap is sliding down blue paint in wide arcs. The air is cool and smells of wet concrete and eucalyptus. A bulb burns over the garage. Your right leg is jittering against nothing, heel lifting and dropping, and you don't stop it because it isn't yours to stop.

Then the sponge is in your hand and the cold is in your knuckles, and the memory comes.

The shirt first. The T-shirt is thin and damp at the back, and it hands you the morning. He stands in a bedroom, pulling the blue linen shirt off a hook, doing the buttons wrong and then right. He rolls the sleeves twice. He hangs the lanyard around his neck and the card knocks his sternum. He is tired already, at 6:40. He likes the weight of the card, though. It says what he is.

The sponge gives you a classroom. Thirty-one desks and a dead plant. A boy in the second row asks him why anyone reads old poems, and he answers badly and thinks about it for three days. The sponge is rough and wet. It gives you a Saturday under another car, the one before this one, and a father's voice saying slow, mijo, circles, don't scrub. Your thumb tucks. Your wrist turns small circles. The paint behind your hand goes clean.

The jeans give you a bar, three beers, and a woman who laughed at his eyebrow barbell and then asked about the scar through the brow. He told her a swing set, age seven. It is the one story he tells well. She left before closing. He drove home with the window down and was not sad exactly, only good at being alone.

The bad part comes up through the soles of his boots. Rent is due Monday and the account holds less than the rent. He has had that arithmetic running in him all afternoon, and it sits in his stomach like a swallowed stone. His back aches low and soft where he carries his weight. He is skinny everywhere but the middle, and he hates that, and he has stopped doing anything about it. Your shoulder is strong, though, and the grip knows the work. His body does tasks without asking you.

You straighten. The stubble is rough under your fingers when you rub your jaw. The little steel bar in the eyebrow clicks against a knuckle.

You lift your hand and turn it over. Soap runs down the wrist. Then you look up at the light and say, quietly, "Nobody's going to know the difference."

The leg is still bouncing. You wonder whether you will be here when the car is dry.