Clarence Whitaker

You are Karim Nasser for less than a minute, and already you are tired of him. The kitchen in Western Kansas is dark. The refrigerator hums. Karim's green eyes watch you in the black of the microwave door, and the beauty mark sits where it always sits. You have stood here with a glass of water you did not want. Somewhere in this house his coworkers' messages are stacking up on his phone, a deploy he cannot fix and you cannot either. You can read his code and you cannot make it mean anything. His fingers know the keys and you do not know why. That is what sends you back: not hatred, only the plain fact that you wear a man who is good at something you will never care about.

The site is open on the laptop. The wheel is already turning, and you pay.

Then there is a mattress under your whole front, and a pillow damp with his breath. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains. Your right arm hangs off the bed, and the blood has gone heavy in it. You draw it up. The body rolls onto its back like a door swinging, and your hands fold on your chest. It is a posture he has never once slept in. You feel that he has never done it, though you cannot say how you know.

You are lying still, and the pieces start to come.

The sheet is cotton, worn thin, and under your fingers it gives you a Sunday: his wife pulling it taut across the bed, snapping it, saying *Clarence, help me*, and his own laugh. The ring on your left hand is plain gold and slightly loose in the cold. When your thumb turns it, you feel him proposing in a church basement, forty pounds lighter and terrified.

The shirt is soft with washing. The same night, years ago, he came home from the shop with the primer dust in his hair, and his daughter, small then, touched the freckles across his nose and said they were where the sun had spilled. His chest goes warm with it. It is not yours. You are only borrowing the warmth.

Your hands are rough along the pads. They remember a sanding block, the long even strokes down a fender, the way gray primer shows every flaw if you let it. They know how to feel a low spot through a fingertip when the eye cannot find it. You have never known anything this well.

Your throat tickles and you clear it, a small dry habit, and your eyes squeeze shut once, hard. Both are his. Your knees ache, the left more than the right. Sixty years of crouching beside other people's wrecked cars live in them. The back is strong, though, and so are the shoulders. You could lift a door panel alone.

A bottle of something brown on the dresser. One drink, or two, most evenings, while the game murmurs. Church on Sundays, the pew's hard wood, his mother's hymnal with her handwriting in it. Brooklyn rain on the stoop. The radiator knocks, and it is a sound he has loved for thirty years.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. The wedding band catches orange. The knuckles are thick, the nails clean, the palms creased gray at the edges where the dust never quite leaves.

You look up, past the dark ceiling, at nothing.

"Clarence," you say, testing the voice. It comes out low and sure. Then, softer: "How long do I get you?"

The radiator knocks twice and goes quiet.