Rubén Salazar Ochoa

You are standing in Julian Carrasco's kitchen with a sandwich half built when you know you're done with him. His shoulders are good and his knees are good. The route is in his legs. Still, there's the mail satchel on its hook, the faint ache in the arch of his left foot, and the neighbor's dog barking at nothing, and you feel the wanting come back like a tide. He can't do it, that's all. He can't be anyone else. You spent a Sunday in his body and found the walls of him. You press the page open with his thumb. The wheel turns, and you go.

Light, a glass tabletop, a cold bottle sweating a ring beside your elbow. Your right forefinger rests on a smooth heart of wood, and it has just skidded across the board. Somewhere behind you someone laughs, nervous and low. The planchette is on GOODBYE, or past it. The hand is still moving. Slow, even, three careful letters. You did not choose them. You are in the hand now, and it stops.

The couch springs creak behind you. Your shirt is a soft gray cotton, washed thin, and where it touches your shoulder blades the first thing comes up: a hallway, a Saturday, a child's backpack held out at arm's length, *Papi, it smells*, and him laughing, a laugh that starts low in this belly. This belly. It rests on your thighs, warm and solid. Forty-eight years of it.

The shirt gives you the morning in pieces. He pulled it over his head in the dark, left arm first because his left shoulder clicks, and he stood a second with the cotton against his face. His wife was breathing beside the bed. He tugged the hem down over his stomach with a small private shrug, forgiving himself. The jeans were on the chair, belt still in the loops, and he stepped into them one leg at a time, holding the dresser. Every day of his working life began this way: sleeves, belt, boots by the door, the gray sleeves for the line pulled from the bag, coffee made too strong because he quit smoking and needs something to hold.

You press your palm to your knee and the denim gives you more. A parking lot at dusk, the heat like a wet towel, a woman he loved before his wife, Marisol, laughing at the hood of a car, twenty-two years old, her hair tied up in a blue scarf. He doesn't think of her often. He thinks of her when the radio plays one certain song, and then he's quiet a minute, and that is all it ever was, and it is a whole room in him with the door shut.

Your fingertips find the bottle's label, damp and peeling. A big night, once or twice a month, with his brother-in-law, and the next morning's slow penance. Then the wedding band, which you touch with your thumb and which turns easily. Behind it comes his husband's hand over his in a hospital corridor the night the third child came, the two of them silent and terrified and happy. Every day of it is in the ring.

The line, the door panel coming down on its rail, the impact wrench's kick against the heel of your palm. You know that kick. Your wrist knows the torque before you do, four bolts, a quarter turn each, twenty-two years of it in the tendons. Freckles heat across your cheeks. The sun comes through the window and rests there.

You lift your hand off the wood and turn it over. Thick fingers, a pale band of skin under the gold, the palm creased and callused at the base. It is steady. It is yours.

You look up. The faces around the table are waiting, a little frightened, a little amused.

"Sorry," you say, in his low voice, with his accent soft around the edges. "I think it's over."

And under it, quiet, the question that is always there: how long.