Darius Whitmore

Vijay Nambiar's knees are the reason, or that is what you would tell anyone. You stand in a kitchen in small-town Ohio with a mug of tea going cold in a hand that has begun to shake a little, a retiree's hand, spotted and thin. The stubble itches. The morning light in the window is thin and tame. Sixty-three years of a body that apologizes every time it stands up, and you have worn it for less than a minute.

It is not the knees. It is that the first thing he did, in the first minute, was reach for the tea, and the cup was already in your hand when you remembered you hate tea. You wanted to be someone whose hands know what to do. You wanted to be busy. Seventy spins, and you still could not say it aloud, so you tell yourself it is the knees, and you open the page.

The wheel turns. You pay.

Then there is a weight on the upward arm. The wrench is in your fist, and your wrist is already turning, and the motion goes wrong. The jaw of the wrench slips a quarter inch off the nut. You catch it. You do it again, slowly, seated right, and the nut gives. Then the next one, and you check it with your thumb, and the next, and you check that too, on a job that has not needed checking in years. Your breath goes in deep. There is a light tube buzzing overhead and white sun at the open bay door.

The shirt comes first. Navy cotton, soft from washing, stiff at the cuffs with grease that never fully leaves. The sleeves are rolled twice, and you feel his hands do it this morning: a thumb pressing each fold flat, because his mother said a man who rolls sloppy works sloppy. DARIUS is stitched on the chest. He ironed nothing. He buttoned from the bottom up, standing in a kitchen with the radio on low, a gospel station, a choir you almost know, and the smell of coffee he made for someone else because he does not drink anything stronger than that. He does not drink at all. His father did. That is all the memory says, and it stops there, closed like a door.

The rag in the back pocket. You touch it, and a whole afternoon opens: the shop's owner shouting about a transmission, and Darius saying yes sir, and his jaw tight, because the loan on the tools is bigger than what the tools are worth. He owes more than he owns. Every month he does the arithmetic on the back of an invoice and folds it small. The belt is stiff leather, worn through to a paler hole. He punched that hole himself with a nail, the week he got lean for a girl and then got lean again for work. The girl now is Marisol, or the one he is with now has a name like that, and she laughs with her whole shoulders. And there is the other one, the old ex, a number in his phone he never deleted and never calls. You feel that as a small stone in the chest.

The boots are heavy and cracked across the toes. The concrete under them is cool through the soles. Your calves ache in the good way. Your shoulders are wide and loose, the arm overhead steady, the forearm corded around the handle of the wrench. His wrist knows the torque without asking. Your heart is slow and young, and there is a sweet chemical taste at the back of the tongue: the vape, the one thing he does, mango, in the truck at lunch, with the windows down. Beyond the door, across the chain-link, a turquoise house takes the light. Nothing in him is tired of anything yet.

You lower the wrench and look at your hands. Wide, dark, calloused across the pads, nails cut short and clean at the edges. You turn them over. You flex them. They obey before you ask.

Then you look up, past the car, past the door, at whoever is looking.

"Okay," you say, in a voice lower than any you have had. "Okay. Let's see what you were doing."

And underneath it, already, quietly, like a pulse: how long. An hour, a year. When the wanting comes back, and whether the hands will still be yours tomorrow.