Xavier Montoya

You are in Lionel Whitaker's kitchen, and the coffee has gone cold in a mug you do not remember choosing. Sixty-three years in these knees. The right one clicks on the stairs. His reading glasses are pushed up into the white of his hair, and every morning in this house is the same one, folded over and over. You have been him for less than a minute, and you have already taken the tour. The radio says something about the Mets. The window over the sink shows a maple, a fence, a neighbor's hose coiled like a sleeping thing. It is all so quiet that your own pulse is the loudest thing in it.

He has a good life. That is the trouble. Nothing in it wants anything from you. You open the page anyway, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb, and the old man's heart goes quick and stupid with the ticking. You want a man who is in the middle of something. Spin.

Then you are standing.

There is a sheet of paper in your left hand and a phone in your right, and the floor is carpet over concrete, firm and slightly springy. Your weight sits low and square. Everything is closer to the ground. Cool air-conditioning moves against a forearm. Through glass walls, a ridge of mountains stands over the roofs of old brick bungalows. You were mid-motion, and the motion is still in the hands: a thumb already sliding on glass, a page already half turned.

The first thing you do is wrong. The thumb lands on the wrong corner of the screen. You catch it, and do it again slowly and properly. Then ten more times, each one checked, though the body would swear it has not needed checking in years.

The polo is soft with washing, and it lifts something. Navy, the third one of its kind, bought on a Saturday because the old one had faded at the collar. A woman's voice, his wife's, from a bedroom doorway: *that one, you look like you run things.* He laughed. He ironed nothing. He pulled it over his head in the dark this morning with the shoulders tight from yesterday's lifting, then the khakis, left leg first, the way he has dressed for twenty years. You taste toothpaste. You feel the cool of a razor along a jaw that is smooth right now, a morning habit as automatic as breathing.

The ring is a small tight pressure on your left hand, and it opens something warm and a little sore. A porch step, her shoes beside his, evening coming down orange behind the mountains. Another night, a bad one. A name that is not hers, an old girlfriend he looked up once and closed the tab on, and the guilt of not even having done anything. He has told no one, and now it sits in your chest like a swallowed coin.

The lanyard swings against your thigh. Retail security, a floor of people who answer to him, the open door of his office behind you. You feel a decade of small managing: the tired hello, the schedule fixed so someone could make a recital, the one firing he still dreams about. His shoulders know how to carry it. The belt is stiff leather, and his hips are used to the weight of keys.

The body is forty, short and dense, and it feels like a fist. The calves burn faintly from the morning's stairs. A knot sits under the right shoulder blade. A cartilage ring in the upper ear presses cold when you turn your head, a thing he did at twenty-six to prove something to a brother, and kept.

You lower the paper. You turn your right hand over, ring and all, and look at it. Thick fingers, short clean nails, the knuckles of someone who works. They are yours now. You lift your eyes to the glass, to the faint figure in it, and say, quietly, "Okay. Hello."

Your thumb finds the ring and turns it once. You wonder how long. Whether, when the wanting comes back, you will feel it in this chest first, and whether tomorrow you will still be here to find out.