Rubén Castañeda

You are standing in Peter Lamoureux's kitchen with the coffee going cold, and you have already decided. He has been yours less than a minute. The kitchen is small and clean and smells of the dishwasher tablet someone set going before bed. On the counter there is a lunch packed by a woman who loves him. His phone lights up with a name that says Mom. You do not answer it. You turn the phone face down, because the trouble is not him, it is the minute. You took him and the wanting did not stop. It sat in his chest like a second pulse, and you knew the wheel would be open on the laptop before the coffee was done. So you spin.

The engine drops a note and catches.

Dusk, or the hour before it is dawn: blue light, porch lamp yellow on the siding, wet grass. A handlebar is cold and gritty under both palms. The vibration runs up through the bones of his forearms into his teeth. You are halfway down a lawn. Cut clippings stick to his shins, and one earmuff has slid off his ear, so the engine is loud on one side and thin on the other.

Your hands do not let go. They know the bar. The left one rises, unhurried, and puts the earmuff back over the ear. The right keeps the mower steady, as if you had walked this lawn a thousand times.

The pocket of the plaid shirt has a weight in it, and when your thumb brushes the cloth, a flash comes that is not yours. A hand pressing a button flat on this same shirt at the kitchen door, in the dark, quietly, so as not to wake her. Each button is a small, patient decision. Then the cuffs, rolled twice, the way she once said she liked. The black undershirt was washed so often it has gone soft at the collar. The work pants are stiff with old grass and oil, and the knees remember kneeling to a carburetor.

His wedding band is warm on the bar. Touching it opens a whole afternoon: a courthouse hallway, a woman laughing at his eyebrow, saying it was the first thing she saw and the thing she would know him by anywhere. He was shy. He was forty, and he is still happy.

Under the sleeve, against your skin, the tattoo itches. You do not look. The feeling comes anyway: a name, a date, and a grief he carries lightly, because he has learned to carry it.

His body is thin and stringy and tired in the hips. Forty-nine years sit in the lower back. The shoulders are stronger than they look. Your free hand drifts up and touches his face, the goatee, the cheek, the bridge between the brows. It is a habit he has when he thinks, and you realize you are thinking in his rhythm. A vape sits in the other pocket, and his mouth wants it. The wanting is his, and no craving of yours has ever felt so small. He has never drunk. He prays, and the evening has a shape because of it: water, then the cloth on the floor, then quiet.

Under his shoes the lawn is soft. Beyond the fence a plastic toy car sits in someone's garden, red and yellow, and something in him goes tender at it, not sad, just tender, a door left unlocked.

You lift your right hand off the bar and turn it over. The palm is rough, the ring is plain, and the knuckles are scraped. It is a good hand. It is not yours. It will be yours for as long as it is.

You look up and say, to no one, "Okay. Let's see how long."

Your thumb hovers over nothing, and under the hum you wonder when the wanting comes back, and whether tomorrow you are still him.