Alvin Reginald Pascoe

Craig Sutter's kitchen is gray with the hour before anything opens. I stand at his counter with his coffee going cold, and his bald head is cool under my palm. He has been mine for five days and seventeen hours. His knees are good. His eyes are good. His house is quiet in the way of money.

Nothing is wrong with him, and that is the whole trouble. Yesterday his team clapped when he fixed the thing nobody else could fix, and I felt nothing at all. I felt it the way you feel a glove being praised. I want a man I have to learn. I open the page, and the wheel is already turning.

Then the floor is carpet under both knees, and I am halfway up out of an amen with the laugh still in my chest. It goes out of me like air from a tire. I come down hard, both knees, and my forehead meets a bedspread that smells of dryer sheets and old cedar. My hands are knotted together. The clock on the nightstand glows 03:14.

The shirt comes first, soft gray cotton gone thin at the collar. It gives me a morning: his thumbs hooking the hem, the closet door that sticks, the radio saying the trades are light today. He pulled this one on over a body that ached from the bench. Eleven years of standing under white light, racks of tubes, the centrifuge winding down with its long falling note. His calves remember it. His lower back keeps its own ledger.

The carpet under my shins gives me his mother's voice, and then the church in Waipahu: folding fans, a hymnal with a cracked spine, a boy told to close his eyes when his eyes would not close. Tonight he prayed with them open on the clock, not very seriously, and I feel what the amen was. It was a small joke between him and God, the laugh of a man who has quit drinking and quit cigarettes and kept one habit that costs nothing. The bedspread against my face is the quiet of a house on posts, the tin roof ticking as it cools, red dirt tracked in on his heels, the glare tomorrow will bring. He lived alone here a long while. The loneliness has no sting left in it. It is worn smooth, like a step.

My fingers come apart and one thumb starts clicking, a small motion against my knuckle, the click of a pen that is not there. His hands want that pen. They have clicked it through every long wait of his working life. When I press my nose it aches with an old crooked memory: a door, a bad year, a doctor saying *it'll set a little off*. He decided it was fine.

I lift my head and sit back on my heels. The window is black and shows me a stranger's face: goatee salted at the chin, blond hair, brown eyes. I turn my hands over in the lamplight. They are broad and callused, and they are warm.

"Well," I say, and his voice is low and a little rough, "amen."

Somewhere under the quiet, the question is already waiting. How long does this one last? When does the wanting come back? I don't know, and the clock goes on glowing.