What the night shift had left him was bus nineteen, a lift that shuddered at mid-height, a driver named Earl who reported, in writing, that the bus was "making a noise like a spoon in a garbage disposal, no offense," and three hours of scheduled brake inspections that somebody in the county office believed could be done in two. Ben Tully was already under bus twenty-three with only his boots and his opinions visible.
"You look tired," Ben said, from beneath the bus, without looking, which meant he was not looking at Tomas at all and was therefore speaking from pure marital-level familiarity. Ben Tully was forty, broad, ginger-bearded, a man who had started at the depot the same month Tomas had and had decided early and permanently that they were friends, a decision Tomas had resisted for almost a year and then surrendered to all at once, the way he surrendered to most good things, late and completely.
"I slept," Tomas said.
"That is not the same as not looking tired. That is a statement about a different subject. Marisol used to say—" Ben stopped himself, the way people who had known her stopped themselves, briefly and with care, and then went on in the revised version. "You got the Sofia weekend schedule worked out with your mom?"
"She's with Rosa tonight through Sunday lunch. School fair meeting tonight for parents, which Rosa is attending in my place on account of the evening shift, and then Saturday Rosa is taking her to the library sale, and Sunday I cook and she supervises and tells me I am doing the rice wrong."
"Are you doing the rice wrong?"
"I have been doing the rice wrong for thirty-nine years, Ben. At this point it is a tradition. The rice expects it."
Ben slid out from under the bus on his creeper with a wrench in his hand and grease on his forehead in the shape of a thumbprint. "Friday's picture day," he announced. "I have it written on the board in the break room in capital letters, and I have set an alarm, and Earl has been instructed. You will be reminded by a team of professionals."
"You are a good friend."
"I am the finest friend in the tri-county area and there is a certificate somewhere that proves it, which I made myself, which does not diminish it." Ben hauled himself upright and looked at Tomas with the appraising squint he usually reserved for alternators. "You ever think about the gym at all anymore? Hector called the depot last week, you know. Asked after you. Earl took the message and wrote it on a brake pad in Sharpie, so the message is now load-bearing, but it exists."
"I think about the gym," Tomas said, honestly, because Ben was one of exactly three people on earth he was always honest with. "I think about it when my back hurts. I think about it when Sofia asks why my nose bends. I think about it like a man thinks about a house he used to live in. I don't need to go back inside to remember the rooms."
"And Hector?"
"Hector I'll call," Tomas said, and Ben nodded and let it go, because Ben Tully understood the difference between a closed door and a locked one, and he had the rare gift of never pushing on either.
The photograph inside his locker door had been taken in a fairground exhibition hall in Columbus eleven years ago, and it showed a man Tomas recognized the way you recognize yourself in a dream, which is to say from a slight distance and with some suspicion. The man in the photograph was twenty-eight years old and eleven pounds lighter and had both shoulders level and all his hair dark, and he had one arm raised by a referee whose name Tomas could still produce on demand, because gratitude is a better filing system than pride. Around his waist, over a pair of plain black shorts, was a belt the size of a dictionary, regional and unsanctioned and heavy with exactly the meaning he had assigned it at the time, which was all of it. Regional champion. Two title defenses. A record with a number of wins he never said out loud anymore, because the number had stopped being a fact about him and had started being a fact about a person he had agreed, in a hospital corridor three years ago, to stop being first.