Rudy Barrientos

Caleb Dreyer's knees are the first thing I am done with. Eleven minutes in him and I know the whole inventory: the grease-burn on the wrist that isn't there but feels like it, the ache of standing on a fryer-line floor, the weight of a body that weighs nothing and gets no respect for it. A manager has already called him kid twice. I sit with his thumbs on a phone in a Detroit break room, the middle of a gray Tuesday, and the page is open, the wheel painted in its patient colors. Nothing is wrong with him. He works. I just want to be heavier. I want someone the room waits for. I pay, and the wheel turns.

The stirring stops mid-circle.

Heat on my face, then gas-flame blue at the edge of my eye, and a wooden spoon in a hand that is thick across the knuckles. I am standing. My weight sits low and forward in a belly that carries it easily, and the floor is tile, cool through the soles. The spoon wants to go the other way, so I let it, and the pan answers with a softer hiss. Light comes flat through the window on my left. A single plate waits on the counter beside the stove.

The shirt comes first. Flannel, soft with washing, and it lets go of him sleeve by sleeve. Left cuff, a button he fastens with his thumb and middle finger together, the way he's done since a sleeve once caught a burner. He pulled it on this morning in a dim bedroom, a woman's breathing still slow in the dark behind him, and he felt a plain gladness, a man who is allowed to go on being liked. Her name comes up warm in his chest and not in his head: Marisol, her laugh when he gets the numbers wrong on purpose.

My fingers drum the spoon handle on their own, quick against the wood. Under it the counter edge presses my hip, and with it a flash: two kids on these tiles, one on a stool and one on the floor with a toy truck, and him cooking and saying, *taste it, taste it.* He had the schedule memorized and the weekends counted. It's a Tuesday, though. They're elsewhere. A hollow comes with it, so mild he doesn't even call it lonely. He just sets out one plate and means it, like a man practicing.

The pants are heavy khaki and the pocket holds keys, and the keys give me a office, a quiet desk, a client chair that stays empty more often than he admits, charts glowing at nobody. He's good with money and bad at selling himself, and he knows exactly how that sounds. He doesn't drink. A long-ago night with his father, a bottle, a lesson learned by watching, and a calm that has held ever since. He believes in something, he couldn't say what, and it comes to him at dusk, in parking lots, as a kind of listening.

My back aches low, a sensible ache, the ache of fifty-one. My calves are strong. My jaw feels the goatee, the rasp of gray at the chin, and when I breathe out my cheeks fold into dimples I can feel without a mirror.

I salt the pan and don't taste it. I take down a second plate and set it beside the first. I don't know why. His hand knew.

I look at the hand, turn it over, the knuckles, the pale line where a watch usually sits, the fingers still drumming. Then I look up at nothing, at the window.

"Well, Rudy," I say, in a voice that sits lower than I expected. "Let's see what you made."

The spoon is warm. The second plate is empty. And somewhere behind my ribs, already, the quiet question of how long before I want something else.