Anthony Haddad

Warren Takeda's knees ache on the porch step, and the coffee has gone cold in the mug I've been holding for seven minutes without drinking. The ridge is still dark. A rooster somewhere is wrong about the hour. I've had this old man since last night, sixty-five years of him, and he is a good body, slow and honest. That is the trouble. Nothing in him wants anything. The beauty mark on his cheek itches and I leave it alone. I came back to the page because I stood in his kitchen and found I could not make myself hungry. I will not say more than that. The wheel turns, and he is already cooling in the mug.

Corridor. Floor under my soles, a long polished speckle of terrazzo, and a cart handle in both hands, steel cold and a little tacky. I have the mop halfway out of its slot. Something went wrong a half second ago, the wrong hand, the wrong angle, and I put it back and do it again slowly, correctly. Then ten more motions, each one checked, on a job this body has done ten thousand times and never once had to watch.

The smell comes first: lemon cleaner over radiator dust, old chalk, wet wool somewhere in the lockers. The clock on the wall ticks toward the hour before the day begins. Outside the tall windows, the brick across the street is gray, and the air conditioners sit dead in their frames. Nobody is here. He chose this shift. The quiet is the only thing he likes about it.

The handle gives me him. Wet street, sodium light, a brownstone stoop, and a wife's voice from upstairs saying keep it down, the girls are asleep. Two daughters, or a daughter and a son. The feeling arrives before the faces: a tightness under the sternum that is love with a bill stapled to it. Numbers on a kitchen table. A pen he keeps clicking. Somewhere between twenty-five and a hundred thousand dollars down, and he knows the figure to the dollar and tells no one.

The keys at his hip knock against my thigh, and I close my hand around them. Brass, worn. A flash: his thumb finding the right key in the dark without looking, a locked boiler room, his father's way of holding a ring. He quit smoking in this hallway. He still reaches for his breast pocket when the radiator knocks. His chest remembers the pack, and wants it.

The shirt is a gray work shirt, soft from washing, and the cuffs are rolled twice. The morning gives itself through the sleeves. He dressed in the dark so he wouldn't wake her. Left arm first, then right. He buttoned from the bottom, a habit from boyhood, and stood a moment at the bedroom door listening to her breathe. On the dresser sat a phone with a name in it he did not call. The recent ex-girlfriend, the one who still matters, and what he felt was neither guilt nor wanting, only a held breath. He is spiritual in a way he never says aloud. He touched the doorframe the way other men touch a mezuzah. Then the stairs, the stoop, the wet.

The body underneath: five-eight, dense, forty-seven. The lower back has a slow ache like a hand pressing. Shoulders strong from lifting buckets. The jaw is smooth, shaved close, and the skin there stings a little in the cold. He never drinks. His mouth tastes of mint and nothing else.

I look down. The left hand is on the cart, with a plain gold band worn thin on the underside. The right thumb has already begun, without being asked, to pick at the cuticle of the first finger until it burns. I turn both hands over. They are scarred from work and entirely mine.

I lift my eyes to the dark window, and then to you.

"Okay," I say. "Whose are you now?"

Somewhere a pipe knocks. I do not know how long this one lasts. The old hunger sits in the back of him, already stirring.