Apology

didn’t mean it, Tommy,” she said.
“But I did,” Tom said. “I did mean it.”
When Shoe woke the next morning, he found himself facedown on the floor. He had fallen off the couch. He had even managed to bring the crocheted throw with him. It had tangled around his legs, as if it were a hammock he had fallen asleep inside, his own little cocoon.
He remembered a time he had jumped a freight train outside of Salinas. He did so thinking he was heading north, and had ended up going east. On one stretch of the trip, oblivious to his misdirection, he had emptied sacks of fruit and used the ripped cloth to make a crude sling. He fastened its ends on the eye hooks that protruded from the rusted metal corners of the storage car. Passing the blistered rows of newly harvested fields, the lines of soil ticking by, Shoe lay in the makeshift hammock and drowsed as best he could.
He checked the digital alarm clock plugged into the outlet by the couch. The clock was something Paul let him use now that Shoe had found a job. It was still early. Everyone in the family is asleep, Shoe thought, scratching at his chest and then at the meshy spot on his shoulder. The scar itched. He made an inadvertent noise the way a dog might.
You can’t stay here, Exequiel.
The train was years away from him now.
Shoe put on only his pants. His right foot squeaked against the floor. He stopped and changed his walk so that it wouldn’t drag, then went into the kitchen to make coffee.
Mary was sitting at the table and reading the morning paper.
Without a shirt on, Shoe felt self-conscious. He tried to suck in his stomach, but it didn’t matter. His posture was still slightly broken. As he poured himself a cup, he imagined her staring at the spot on his shoulder that caused him to stoop like a hunchback. It was the wadded flesh of scar tissue that made him look deformed.
He wondered if Paul had ever told her about how they found him that day long ago, when he was still a boy living in another country. Paul had left for the States by then. Paul had not seen the large, fresh wound from which his younger brother had to recover.
“I can make you something,” Mary said.
“It’s okay.”
“No, I don’t mind,” she said, and set down her paper.
She went to the fridge and took out a carton of eggs and some butter and a bell pepper that had been cut in half and covered with foil. There was also part of an onion she brought out and began to dice. She then cut a pat of butter and slid it onto a warm skillet. When the omelet was finished, she folded it onto a plate and placed it on the table before him. Shoe closed his eyes as if in prayer.
He was trying to memorize her scent.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that she had returned to her chair across from him. As the paper unfolded between them, he noticed her hands gripping the edges lightly. He felt his brother was a lucky man. They sat in silence while he ate.
Shoe wanted to be the first one on site. He kept reminding himself that he had only been sent home the day before, not fired. He still had a chance. He wanted the foreman to pull up in that cream-colored custom Ford truck and see that there was at least one person left in the world who still believed in an honest day’s work. He wanted to be standing alongside the boss when the others finally showed up. There would be a sweetness to it.
Shoe even harbored the small hope that the foreman would reconsider the name he had given him; that instead of Shoe, perhaps he could be known as Early Bird or Rooster. He would even settle for some bastardization of Exequiel. X, or Zeke.
But after some thought, really, what did he care?
When he reached the site, Shoe went behind the portable urinal and relieved himself. A breeze sent a shock of cool air between his legs. His scrotum recoiled from the chill. There in the thicket of milkweed and other random brush, he stood listening to his piss hiss against the fiberglass siding.
He considered for a moment climbing up on the bulldozer to cover the driver’s seat. The white guy who had operated it yesterday had been a real cocksucker to him, laughing and yucking it up the loudest. But when Shoe finished, his mind leapt to sitting at the table with Mary. He found that despite this environment of strange machinery and torn earth, he could easily recall the memory of her scent. The implication of tenderness.
It was strange to be standing there and thinking of his brother’s wife in this way. He did not want his brother’s wife, it was not that. His life seemed to him a series of moments in which he felt adrift, felt both the ease and unease of being temporarily settled, then uprooted, felt the odd comfort that was in such an existence. And if he did not necessarily feel adrift, then perhaps he felt something entirely opposite. Perhaps he sensed a permanence around which the rest of his life revolved endlessly.
Shoe could sense his own future complacence. It scared him.
He glanced around. There was the calmness of the bulldozer and the excavator. There were the tracks in the dirt and scattered sand. The evenness of the machine and the tread of his own boots. Down the road there were headlights of vehicles leaving the driveways of the neighborhood, but not one was headed this way.
He was not thinking of his brother’s wife now. He was not wishing that it was her hands on him. It was someone else he remembered. A shadowy wall and her silhouette alongside it, sliding down onto