Rubén Maldonado

You are Russell Kearney, sixty-four, and you are sitting in a kitchen chair with a mug gone cold, because the hour was a lie. Four in the morning, and he got up at four. Every morning he got up, counselor to a hundred bad nights, and none of them were yours. You came out of that body knowing everything about other people's craving and nothing about your own, and the wheel has you by the same place it always does. The little blue-eyed man in the glass of the window has a clean scalp and a steady voice and you are bored to the bone of both. You spin.

The crate is under your palms.

Dusk-blue sky, headlights swinging dust, a row of dark greens going away to either side. You are bent over a crate of squash, halfway through, and your fingers have just done something wrong. Then they do it again, slowly, correctly. Your jaw is working. Gum. Mint, gone to rubber.

The shirt comes first. Soft gray cotton, sleeves rolled twice, and the rolling is his: a quarter after four, the kitchen light, a woman's voice behind him saying *take the thermos*, and he hadn't wanted to turn around because the thermos meant she'd been up before him again. The bandana is damp at the throat. He tied it in the truck mirror. Rubén. The name arrives with the knot.

The wood of the crate is rough, splintered under the thumb, and the thumb knows which edge. Eleven years of this edge. Then a flash, hot and wide: a small boy asleep across the seat of this same truck, three more children somewhere after him, and a debt on the roof of the house like weather. Money is a held breath. He doesn't pray. He talks to the mountains sometimes, to the light on them, and he thinks that counts.

Under his boots, gravel, and then the memory of gravel: her hand on his chin in a kitchen, thumb in the cleft, *this is where you keep your stubbornness*. He shaved for her this morning. Smooth jaw, cool in the air. A glass of something amber at night, one, two, his shoulders letting go at last. The back aches in the low place. The knees are fifty-three. The shoulders are strong, absurdly, from carrying a thing ten thousand times.

The wedding band is warm and loose with sweat. You turn it with your thumb.

You lift your hands into the last of the light. They are brown and cracked, not yours, and entirely yours. You turn them over, palms, backs, the pale stripe under the ring.

You look up and say, in his low voice, "Okay. Hello."

Somewhere behind the wanting is already stirring: an hour, a year, you don't know, and the headlights keep coming.