Anthony Joe Redcloud

The carpenter's knees ache in the dark, and that is the reason, though you would never say so aloud. Four in the morning, Boston, a Thursday. His wife's breathing comes through the wall like a tide that has never once wondered about you. You are fifty-nine and standing at the sink with his hand flat on cold porcelain, and you have been him for under a minute. He is a good body. The shoulders work. The moustache is soft against the lip. And you stood here and heard the house tick, and you understood that you had already walked every room of him. The wheel is the only door that opens onto somewhere you have not been. You do not tell anyone this. You pay. The page turns. The wheel goes round and the carpenter's hands let go of the sink.

Heat on your face. The pan.

You are mid-circle with a spoon, and the stirring stops, and you start it going the other way because you can. Something browns in front of you, onions and something ground. The kitchen is small and yellow-lit, the hood light burning over your shoulder. You salt the pan and do not taste it. You are thirty-four. You are lower to the floor than you were a second ago, six inches of height gone, and the weight has moved into the chest and the thighs, dense and settled. The air smells of fat and of dish soap and of a carpet that has held a lot of winters.

You take down a second plate and set it beside the first. You don't know why. Your hand knew.

Then his things begin to arrive.

The shirt first, soft and thin with washing, against your back. A dark tee. It hands you the morning: the dresser drawer that sticks, his thumb working it, the shirt pulled over a head with thinning hair, and the palm going up across the scalp afterward, over the crown where the skin shows, a habit older than the thinning itself. Jeans stiff at the knee. The belt notch worn. Boots by the door, laced in the dark while the fog still sat on the street, cold white light pooling down the steep driveway, the garage below the bay window where he sleeps. He lives under someone else's house. He is doing well, and nobody would guess it, and he likes that.

The spoon handle, warm. Under it, the shovel: a different wood, ash gone slick and grey, the trench wall cold and wet, the mini excavator ticking as it cools, spoil heaped beside him. Four hours of it, the long ache in the low back that he knows how to carry. A pinch of dip under the lip at lunch, the bitter burn, the foreman laughing. Then the thing under that, the quiet one: a drink he put down three years ago and never picked up. A Catholic's guilt, folded small. A church with a drafty side door, the smell of wax, his mother's hand on the back of his neck pushing him gently toward the pew.

The counter edge presses your hip. The tile is cold through his soles. The floor remembers a table with two chairs, and a woman's laugh that has no face yet, and you cannot tell if it is his memory or his wish. The second plate sits pale under the hood light. He set it out before you came. Out of habit, or out of hope. It is not yours to know.

You lift your hand off the spoon and look at it. Broad. Cracked at the knuckles, callus along the palm like a rind. You turn it over. It is steady.

You look up at the black window, where a man in a dark shirt stands with a stranger behind his eyes.

"Well," you say, in a voice lower than you expected. "Somebody's hungry."

The pan hisses. You do not know how long this one lasts, or when the wanting will come back and put its hand on you again, or whether tomorrow you will still be the man who set two plates.