Ruben Castañeda

You are standing in Grant's kitchen in Nashville, in the dark, with the refrigerator humming and his wife asleep upstairs. You have been him for less than a minute. His belly presses the counter edge. His thumb is still on the trackpad of the laptop, and the wheel is spinning on the screen.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He has good knees and a good mortgage, and the best friend he has ever had is a man he talks to every Sunday. You read the texts in his phone while you were him. You know the friend's name is Ruben, and that Ruben has not asked for money in eleven years, though he needed it. You felt Grant's guilt about that sit in his chest like a swallowed stone. You did not want it, so you pressed the button.

The wheel stops.

Linoleum. A cart under your right hand, its steel rail cold. You were turning to wring the mop and your wrist does it wrong, a half-second hitch, so you do it again slowly, correctly. The hallway hums with fluorescent light. Every locker is shut and every door is dark. Your leg is bouncing, and you cannot stop it.

You are small in this body, and light, and the lightness has an ache in it. Your lungs feel scorched and coated. There is a craving behind your teeth, a pack-a-day craving, and your hand moves toward the shirt pocket before you tell it to.

The shirt is gray and thin from washing. Touch the cotton and the morning comes, in his feeling: the bedroom dark, his girlfriend's back turned, two kids' shoes by the door. He buttons the shirt from the bottom up, because his mother taught him that. He threads the keys onto the belt loop, and they jingle. The pants have been hemmed twice. He tugs each sleeve straight over the tattoos. He does not look in the mirror at the mole on his cheek, because he stopped seeing it years ago.

Your fingers find the keys. Keys, and then a stairwell, public steps between backyards in Pittsburgh, wet leaves slick on the concrete, late light. He climbs them every evening, smoking, and counts the rent in his head. He is short by two hundred. Under the counting is a Mass card in his wallet, and a prayer he says without words. He has never touched a drink, because his father did enough of that for three men.

The cart handle gives you more. Grant is in it. Grant at a bar in college, laughing, a hand on Ruben's neck. Ruben sits in the driver's seat of a car that will not start, and Grant says "I've got it" and pays without being asked. Ruben hated that and loved him for it. You were Grant, and you never knew he was loved this way.

You feel the ex-girlfriend, too. It comes from the pocket where his phone sits, still warm. Her name does not arrive, only the sound of her door closing and his stomach dropping. Then the girlfriend he lives with, and her hand on his chest at night. Then the two children, a small shoulder against his ribs and a drawing taped over the kitchen sink.

Your knee will not stop bouncing, and the ache in it is his. Under the fluorescent light you lift your hands. They are brown, cracked at the knuckles, the black ink curling up the forearm. You turn them over. Nothing of him is left to object.

You look up into the dark glass of the doors at the end of the hall and say, in a voice that is not yours or Grant's, "Okay, Ruben."

Somewhere in you the wanting is already asleep. You wonder how long before it wakes.