He prayed over my arm

They had me in Hauppauge the last two weeks, an office they're chopping up into smaller offices. Metal stud, and 5/8 firecode on the lids because it's a commercial building. The company pays me twenty seven an hour and takes nothing out, and when the company's got nothing I'm on Fifth Avenue at a quarter to six with everybody else.

A good day off that corner is a hundred and eighty. Some days you stand there until nine thirty and then you walk back and you've spent the day. Landscaping comes early. Demo comes late and demo will run you until dark and then argue with you about it, and if a guy pulls up and won't say the number before you get in, you don't get in.

I hang board and I tape and I'm better at the taping. Most guys rush the bed coat and then they're fighting that wall for two more coats. You put your all purpose on and you lay the tape into it and then you wipe it tight so there's nothing left underneath to sand out later.

Second coat is an eight inch knife. Third is a twelve, and you carry it past the screw line so a man can't find the joint with a light held flat against the wall. On the corners I want the paper faced metal. The vinyl moves on you after.

I send six hundred every other Friday out of the place on Suffolk Avenue. They take eight and the rate is the rate, there's no sense driving around looking for better. The guy behind the glass in there has a fan pointed at himself all year round.

That's my wife and the three of them in Soyapango. The oldest is in her last year and she came out 9.1 in the math. The middle one is lazy in the language class and she knows she's lazy in it. The little one is eleven.

I came in March of 2017. He was two. Sunday nights at seven I call, which is five there, and my wife stands the phone up against the sugar and cooks, and they come through and go.

I've got a room in a house off Washington with five other guys. Four fifty, and the room came through the church on Wicks Road. There's a schedule taped on the bathroom door that nobody reads because everybody already knows who goes when, and I'm out at five thirty so I'm first in there, and that's worth more than the room is. Chele in the front room is on the phone from when he gets in until he sleeps and it's the same argument every night.

June of 2021 I took a Saturday on a flat roof in Central Islip. Not my work. A guy in the house was short two hands and it was two hundred for the day and I'd have gone for a hundred and fifty.

They were running the mastic up on a rope and the knot wasn't mine. The bucket came around and it went up the inside of my right arm from the wrist to about four inches short of the elbow. That stuff doesn't come off when it lands on you. You can't wipe it, it just goes where you wipe it.

Somebody got a hose on it and somebody sat me down on the parapet. I don't remember coming down the ladder. Back at the house one of the guys called the Deacon, because the Deacon has the truck and the Deacon is who gets called. He took the Pastor's wife to Stony Brook twice and he has never said one word about either time.

The urgent care on Sunrise in Bay Shore runs till eleven. He went by it and had to come back around, because you get in off the side street and not off Sunrise. A hundred and seventy five, cash, because I'm nothing on paper.

Second degree, the woman said, and she said the underside is the bad place for it. They cleaned it out and put the white cream on and a pad that doesn't stick to you, and wrapped it, and wrote down come back Tuesday. There was a cooking show up on the wall in there with no sound and nobody watching it.

We didn't go home after. He put the truck in a spot down the end by the fence and left it running for the air. There's a plaza across Sunrise and the sign on the nail place was half burned out.

He had his work clothes on. He does floors at a place in Islip and he goes in at twelve. He didn't ask me anything.

He talked about the buffer and how they won't get new pads until the pad on there is finished, and he held his thumb up for me to see the nail he hasn't had since a dolly took it off him in 1989. His hands are bigger than mine. His son is in Houston.

We sat in that lot about two hours. He never went in to work that night.

Before he started it up he reached across and took hold of my wrist, under where the tape stopped. Held it there. He said it low and in Spanish and I lost most of it. Maybe a minute. Then he put his hand back on the wheel and said we should go, and I said thank you.

He dropped me at the house and I was up at five thirty and on the corner at a quarter to six. I never did go back Tuesday. I was in Deer Park Monday morning and I taped a bread bag over it to mud, and I changed the pad myself at night with the tape out of my own bag, and it closed up fine. The tube of that white cream is up in the cabinet with my razor.

I used to sit in the back at that church because I came in filthy and late. I don't sit in the back now. Third row on the left, the side he sets the chairs out on. And I go Wednesdays.

Wednesday is small. Fifteen people if it's a good one, and the brother on the keyboard plays over the top of everything anybody says. I know that truck coming down Wicks before it turns in. He wears the same black shoes Wednesday that he wears to the floors.

At the end he comes down the aisle and takes my hand and says my name and puts the other hand on my shoulder a second, the same as he does with the woman in front of me. Then he goes on to the next one. I stack the chairs after. Nine is all you can carry.

Chele goes Sundays too and he said something to me in the kitchen about me being up the front now. I told him the back hurts my neck.

It healed flat and it stays lighter than the rest of me. The middle of it I can't feel if I scratch it.

The little one wants to see it every Sunday. He gets the phone right up against his face and tells me to turn it over and hold it still. My wife asks me does it hurt and I tell her no.

She's got it in her head I'm coming in December. I told her we'd see about December. There's no work there in December anyway, and two weeks off that corner and the corner doesn't know you for a while after. It's six hundred and change out of Kennedy if you go before the twelfth. After the twelfth it's nine.