Ruben Castellanos

You are fifty-three and the knees know it. The farmhand's hands are on the edge of a kitchen table in Phoenix, early, the sky not yet committed to anything, and you have the page open. Last time you were here you were in him for less than a minute. Now the cleft chin, the silver stubble, the brown eyes in the black window: all of it is already old news. He could work. That was never the trouble. Something sent you back, and you don't say what, not even in here. You press the wheel.

Then the bench is under you, slatted wood against the backs of your thighs, and the air is cold iron and rubber and old sweat. Your forearms are on your knees. A bottle sweats on the concrete beside your boot. You were mid-breath, and the breath was his, so you finish it. Then you stand and take the bar two inches wider than a hand would choose, and the weight comes up out of the rack as if it had been waiting.

The rest of him comes through what he touches.

The knurling bites your palms and you are suddenly in a kitchen in Brooklyn, a pot lid rattling, a woman's laugh from the next room, three kids' shoes in a heap by the door. It is his contentment, not yours, a warm tiredness that sits like a coat. You grind the rep out slowly. Your face does none of what a last rep does, because his face never learned to.

The hoodie is soft at the cuffs. Sleeve by sleeve it gives you the morning: his arm into the left one first, always, the zipper's cold teeth, the stoop outside wet under sodium light, a desk waiting beside a corner office where he answers other men's phones and is good at it. Nobody there knows he prays before he sleeps. The cross and praying hands on the inside of your forearm itch a little, and you feel his mother in them, a rosary wound round a wrist at a funeral.

Your knuckles crack by themselves. He does that when he is thinking about something else. It is an old woman, an ex, a porch, a night he still turns over and has told no one. It arrives whole, and it is not yours, and it hurts anyway.

Your shoulders are good. The lower back has opinions. Your dimples are pressing into your cheeks even now, even at rest. You feel them as small hollows in the face.

You set the bar down and turn your hand over. Green eyes would be in the mirror if there were one. You look up anyway, to nobody, to the gray window.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, low, and it is all gravel and warmth. "Okay, Ruben."

Already something in you listens for the wanting to come back, and for how long, and whether tomorrow you will still have his hands.