Samir Beaudry

You leave Manuel Zamora's body in the dark before sunup, standing at his kitchen counter with a cold coffee. The gap in his teeth keeps catching the edge of the mug. You were him for less than a minute, and it was long enough to learn it. His knees ache when he stands up. His phone is full of messages from a man who calls him *hermano*, and none of them are for you.

That is the reason. It is nothing so large as grief. You wanted to go back into the house where his friend lives, and you could not, because Manuel is the one who loves him, and you only wore the love for sixty seconds. So you pay, you spin, and the wheel gives you the friend.

The board clicks to 48.

His knee stops bouncing on the same click. You are in a plastic chair, third from the door, under a strip light that hums in your back teeth. There is a paper cup of water in your hand, gone warm. You set it down square on the seat beside you. You fold your hands and you do not look up, because somewhere behind the glass a voice has said a name, and the name is yours now and you are not ready for it.

The jacket comes first. Canvas, stiff at the elbows, soft at the cuffs, and it smells of cold air and a basement. Your shoulder shifts under it and the memory comes up through the collar: a hook by a door, a woman's voice saying *take the heavy one, it's going to rain*. It is his girlfriend, and he did not want to be told, and he took it anyway. He is fond of being told. He would never say so.

The shirt under it is thin cotton, buttoned wrong by one hole at the bottom. That is the morning, in his fingers: dark apartment, a lamp, the left cuff fought into, a text from Manuel that said *call me after*. He read it twice and put the phone face down.

Your back has weight in it. Ink stretches across it when you breathe, a unit insignia, edges warm at the tops of the shoulders. Nobody gave you the story, but the skin remembers a hot room, a needle, and a man named Okafor laughing. He is grieving men he served with, and he does not tell anyone that, not even the girlfriend.

Your thumb goes to your mouth. The nail is already short, bitten to the quick, and you feel the habit run through you like a stair you did not know was there. The beard scratches at your knuckle. Two inches of it, coarse, salt-and-pepper. You stop. You do it again.

Under your feet are boots, resoled twice. In your pocket there is a ring of keys, cold, each one a building: a hallway, a ladder, a ceiling panel with water behind it. His hands know how to find a leak by sound. They know the hex key, the tension of a wrench. The hands are strong and scarred across the knuckles, and they are shaking very slightly, and you know why. He is here for something that will be said to him in a room. A result, a form, a signature. The memory will not open, only the fear does, and it is his and it is clean.

Then something else, from far back, through the hollow of the jacket pocket where a folded paper sits worn soft: a woman on white marble steps, laughing, hair in her mouth from the wind. The one who got away. He kept her handwriting. You feel him not take it out.

And Manuel, always Manuel, in a truck cab, with the radio low, saying *you good?* and him saying *yeah*. You know how that man's voice sounds from the outside now. You know it from the inside too.

The voice behind the glass says the name again.

You look at your hands. Brown, freckled across the backs, nails chewed. You turn them over. Then you lift your eyes and look straight out.

"Hey, Manny," you say, soft, to no one. "I've got him."

You stand, and you do not know how long.