Danny Truong Vo

You are standing in a dark kitchen on Oahu with a glass of water you do not want. Warren Kimo Dillard's feet are bare on the linoleum. His knees ache in the way of a man who is fifty-six and has spent years on concrete catwalks above settling tanks. Three minutes you have worn him. The gap in his front teeth whistles when you breathe through it, and you cannot stop pressing your tongue into it. The goatee itches. The refrigerator hums. Somewhere down the hall his house is asleep, and none of it is yours, and none of it is wrong, and you are bored to the marrow already. He is competent. He is kind to his dog. He is nothing you wanted. The wheel is a page on a phone, and your thumb knows the way.

You pay. The wheel turns. The water glass is still in your hand when it stops being his.

Cold, then not cold: the basement. Fluorescent hum above, a tube with a stutter in it. You are crouched at an open dryer, heat on your face, one sock pinched in your right hand. The concrete is damp through your knees. You are twenty, and your body feels it: the springy hips, the ease of the crouch. Under that is the soft belly, the thin arms, a tiredness that sits behind the eyes like a pre-dawn bus.

Your nose is wrong. You breathe in and the left side whistles slightly, the bridge a little crooked. Detergent, lint, old pipe water.

You pull the load out, warm as a held animal, and drop it in the basket. Then your hands start folding on their own, fast, corners squared, sleeves tucked, and they touch a gray shirt, and he comes.

The shirt: his mother's voice on the phone, years back, saying a folded shirt is a made decision. He learned it from a man at a dry cleaner on Washington Avenue, a summer job at sixteen, a Cambodian-Chinese owner who slapped his wrist for a crooked cuff. That is why the hands are exact here and nowhere else. Upstairs, eight crumpled shirts in a drawer. Down here he is a different boy, a careful one.

The hoodie on your back is heavy with its own warmth. Zipper teeth cold at your sternum. The morning he put it on comes up in his fingers: dark room, the alarm not yet sounding, the thin hour before the day starts. He dressed by feel, jeans first, the hoodie off the chair, the blue of his hair gone faded against the pillow, a dye job he did himself in a bathroom with a friend named Teo, laughing, the sink stained for weeks. Clippers set to one length at the sides. The hard line was Teo's idea. He loved it.

Your right thumb is itching for something. It goes to the pocket and finds a lighter, brass-colored, dented. Flick, flick. He does not smoke and never did. He got it from his father's drawer after the funeral, and he flips it when he is afraid of the rent. The wheel of it under your thumb spins the whole winter: the electric bike, the battery that died on Spruce, the white marble steps worn hollow, a woman in a doorway who tipped him four dollars and called him sweetheart, and he nearly cried on the curb. Fifty-one hundred dollars at most in the whole of him. A church on Sunday he half goes to, the hymns he knows by heart and does not mean. A big night once or twice a month, then a bad Saturday after. No one waits for him. No one mattered enough to ache.

The sock is still in your left hand. Wool, thick, a hole forming at the heel. You hold it to the light.

You look at your hands. They are long, a little chapped, the knuckles clean. They turn over and over. You look up, and the tube above you stutters.

"Okay," you say, in a voice with a Philadelphia flatness you did not choose. "Okay. Hello, Danny."

The lighter turns in your pocket. You do not know how long. An hour, a year, a minute before the want comes back like thirst. You fold the sock, and wait to find out.