Dean Michael Ostrander

You are tired of the way Marcus Whitehorse Begay answers the phone. That's the truth of it, and you will not say it better. Six days and fourteen hours, and every Saturday morning in San Francisco the fog sits on the window like a lid, and you stand in his kitchen with his coffee going cold, and his phone lights up with the people he sells to, and your thumb knows exactly which one to ignore. His thumb knows. You never taught it. The body keeps being competent at a life that is not yours, and today it kept being competent at it until you could not stand being so well handled. So you sit down at the page with the wheel on it. Marcus's shoulders are loose with the ease of a man nobody has ever refused. You pay. You spin. You feel the click go through him like a coin through a slot.

Then the hum.

A fluorescent tube, close overhead, a thin electric complaint. Your knees are bent hard and the backs of your thighs are pressed against your calves. Warm cotton lies across your fingers, and there is a sock in your hand. The air smells of detergent and hot lint and cold concrete. You are crouched at an open dryer, and the whole of you has weight, a great deal more than Marcus carried, settled low into the heels of boots you did not choose.

You pull the load out. It comes warm against your forearms, a heavy armful, and you drop it into the basket. Your hands start folding before you have decided anything.

The shirt first. The shirt on your back is thin and soft, black going gray, and it holds the shape of him. Its collar rubbed at his neck this morning while he stood in a room with the blinds shut against white light. He pulled it from the drawer, one of eight, all crumpled, because he does not fold upstairs. That arrives in his feeling: a small stubborn pleasure in not caring, and underneath it a dull wish that someone were there to mind. He pushed one arm through, then the other. The sleeve slid over a name and a date in script on his upper arm, and his fingers touched the place, the way they always do, without asking him. You do not get the name. You get the touch, and the touch is grief, quiet and old and carried like a tool.

The pants are stiff at the knee with dried plaster. A heat comes up out of them: a framed-out house, sawdust hanging gold in the light, the pitch of a saw, the clean joy of a corner that comes out square. He is good at this. The knowledge sits in his wrists. When you square a towel, the corners meet without you, because downstairs he is exact and upstairs he is not, and the two men have never met in him.

The sock in your hand is gray and thick. The thumb of the other hand drifts to your mouth. You catch it at your lip, and your teeth already know the edge of the nail, bitten low and ragged. A flash: his father's kitchen, a rosary on a nail by the door, a boy told to stop that, and not stopping. Mass on Sundays, a pew that creaks, the beer after with men from the crew, two, never three, because three is where his father began. He has not been home to anyone in a long time. He sleeps in a house that is flat-roofed and turquoise, and the dust leans against the chain-link every afternoon. There is almost no money, and he does not mind it as much as he should.

His body is thirty-six and feels it in the right places. The low back aches from the squat. The knees complain, but they hold. The forearms are thick and hard and warm from the laundry, and your breath goes in deep and slow, a bigger chest than you have worn, steady. The scalp is bristled under your palm when you rub it. It prickles. The stubble on your jaw rasps your knuckle. Everything is a little rougher than Marcus, and more honest, and you are already hungry for it.

You hold your hands out in front of you in the hum of the light. Broad, scarred across the knuckles, nails chewed. You turn the right one over, and then the left. A man's whole evening is in them, and none of it is yours.

You look up at the small window, bright with desert noon, and say, quietly, "Okay. You."

Nobody answers. The dryer ticks as it cools. You wonder how long you get, whether the wanting will wait for the laundry to be done or come back before the next sock, and you keep the sock in your hand.