Darnell Whitfield

You are standing in the kitchen of a man you have been for under a minute, and the fridge light is on your borrowed beard. Calvin Prescott Aldous. Thirty-two, tall, soft in the middle, a white streak in the hair that you caught in the microwave door and could not stop looking at. It is early, the street outside still blue and empty, his coffee not yet made. His mechanic's hands lie on the counter, and they are good hands. That is the trouble. They are good at something and you wanted none of it. A torque wrench lives in his bag by the door, and you stood over it a second ago, and it said nothing to you. You wanted a man, and the wheel gave you a job. So you pay again, and your thumb is already on the screen.

Then the light changes. A bright frame, a commercial or a cut, white across the room, and you are sitting up straight on a couch you have never seen. The remote is in your right hand. You set it on the arm. The dark is thick, the window black, the lamp off. Somewhere a refrigerator hums. Everyone is asleep. Nobody is in this room but the television and you.

The couch is rough under your forearms, a worn weave, and the moment your back settles into it something comes up that is not yours: a Saturday, a delivery truck, him and a woman carrying this couch up the trailer steps, laughing, her end tilting, sagebrush scraping the cushions. His pride. He paid for it in cash.

You lift your hand. The remote is warm from his grip. The buttons are worn smooth, and under your thumb is a night six months ago, her asleep against this shoulder, the show on, him afraid to move his arm. The feeling is plain tenderness. It goes through you like a swallowed coin.

The shirt is soft gray cotton, thin at the collar, and it gives you morning: him pulling it from the hook beside a pair of work shirts, the dark green ones with the pocket he keeps his glasses in. Not tonight. Tonight is the soft one. The jeans next, stiff at the knee, belt skipped, and the socks, thick, one with a hole at the heel he keeps meaning to mend. He dressed in the dark so he would not wake her. You feel his care in it, the held breath at the squeaking floor.

Your left forearm lies on the couch arm. There is ink there, a face in black and gray, and when your eyes find it the memory comes whole: his father, the photograph, the long afternoon in a chair, and the quiet after. A prayer rug rolled in the closet. Five times a day he has tried, and tonight he missed one and carries it like a stone. No drink in him. He quit, and the quitting still sits in the mouth as a clean, metallic want.

The body is good. Thirty-three, five-eleven, the shoulders tired in the honest way, a dull ache low in the back from standing on concrete all day while the line ran. The knees complain. The earlobe holds a small cool weight, the silver hoop. He is a foreman, and men listen to him because he never raises his voice. Your jaw knows how to stay calm. In a drawer somewhere is a bank card with more in it than anyone would guess, saved a little every week, for something he has not named to her yet.

On the screen a man is laughing, and the laugh track rolls, and you do not laugh. You never knew where he did.

You turn your hands over in the television light. They are broad, the knuckles scarred pale, the palms rough, the fingers still curled around the shape of the remote. Not Calvin's. Not yours.

You look up, toward the dark window, where a man with a goatee looks back.

"Hello, Darnell," you say, low, so as not to wake her.

How long, you wonder. The wanting is quiet now, but it was quiet in the kitchen too.