Rubén Escobedo Salazar

You are standing in a kitchen in Houston, in Brandon Keith Sorensen's socks, and the coffee you made is going cold because you have stopped tasting it. The beard is the first thing. It itches at the corners of his mouth, and you have caught yourself twice now rubbing it with the flat of his thumb, a gesture that belongs to nobody you have been. The broken nose whistles on the in-breath. The headset hangs on its hook by the door like a small black animal, and in an hour it will be on your head, and a stranger will tell you about his router, and you will say *I understand how frustrating that is* in a voice that is not yours either. He has been you for less than a minute. That is the whole trouble. You have a body that works, a full beard, green eyes, a decent chair, and what you want is not in it. The wanting did not leave when you changed men. It came with you, folded up small in every one, and it is hungry again. So you open the page with the wheel on it and pay.

Then there is no kitchen.

There is carpet under your knees, and a mattress edge against your ribs, and your breath is mid-laugh and then isn't. You were getting up. Your weight is halfway off the floor and you let it go back down. Both knees take it. Your forehead finds the bedspread, quilted cotton, cool. The amen is still in your mouth.

The room is bright and quiet. It is the middle of the morning and the curtains are open, so this is a man who works nights and is only now going to bed, or only now getting up. The clock on the nightstand is eleven forty-five or close to it. He was kneeling with his eyes open on it, praying the way you pray when you mean it a little.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. Navy cotton, washed thin, tight across the shoulders and loose at the waist. The collar is stretched where he pulls it down. Cotton against your back, and then his hands are putting it on, a morning that was this morning: the drawer sticking, the shirt on top because he does not fold, one arm and then the other, the cuffs of the sleeves resting against two tattoos. He is thinking of nothing. He is thinking of the road.

Your hands are flat on the quilt now, and the quilt is hers. It was his mother's, stitched in squares of pale blue and cream. The memory comes up through your palms warm and slow: a kitchen in a different state, a woman with a thimble, a smell of starch, and him a boy under the table with a toy truck, driving it along the floor seam, making the engine noise with his lips. He has been a driver since before he had a license. You feel the pride of it, and under it a small ache you can't name.

The jeans. Denim gone soft at the knee, a belt he has notched past its first hole. Pressure at the waist where he has put on a little, and none of it in the legs. They are strong. Five foot six of him, and the strength is low and compact, in the thighs, in the grip, the back of a man who hauls chains and tarps and lifts himself into a cab four times a day. Something in the left hip complains, an old dull note, and the knees say they are fifty-three. His jaw is tight. You find that out because it aches. He clenches it when he is not thinking, and he is not thinking, and your teeth are pressed together hard enough to hurt.

You look at the inside of his left forearm. A name, in script, and a date. Another tattoo above it, lettering you can't read upside down. The name floods you before you understand it: *Esperanza*. Not a woman. Or not only. A word he had put on his skin the year he stopped drinking, and under it a different feeling, a woman's laugh in a parking lot and her car pulling out, the taillights going red and then small. She is the one who got away. He did not chase her. He sat in his truck afterwards with the engine off and his hands on the wheel and he prayed, badly, for the first time in years.

His hands. The wheel is in them even here, the ghost of its rim worn smooth under the palms, ten and two. The nightstand has a bottle of pills and a Bible with a cracked spine and a photograph in a frame turned slightly toward the bed: a girl, twelve or thirteen, missing a front tooth, squinting in sun. Your throat does something you did not tell it to do. His daughter. The memory is not an afternoon, it is a sound, a phone ringing on a Sunday at a rest stop, *Papi?*, and him standing between two trucks with his cap in his hand so he could hear her better. He has not had a drink in nine years. The mouth remembers the wanting of it anyway, a dry metal taste, and the ghost of a cigarette between two fingers. That too he gave up. You feel the place where it used to be.

The carpet is rough under his toes. Bare feet. A creek smell comes faintly through the window, green and brown and wet, and with it a footbridge, cables humming under his boots in a wind, him halfway across it at dawn with a thermos, thinking nothing at all, happy. That is the best one. You stay in it.

Then you lift your head. The room swims, settles. Your hands are on the bedspread, thick-fingered and brown, the skin creased at the knuckles. You turn them over. Palms rough. A white line of old grease in the creases that no soap takes. You close them. They close like they have always known how.

You get up slowly, the hip taking its toll, and you look at the clock, and you say it out loud in a voice that sits lower than any you have had, an accent with hills in it:

"Well. Amen."

The jaw is clenched again. You let it. Somewhere under the wheel the next question is already waiting, patient and small: how long you have this one. You do not know. Nobody does. The shirt is warm. The clock changes a number.