Faisal Rehman

The hand doesn't feel like it's mine yet — a trucker's hand, thick knuckles, the wedding-band ghost-line where a prosthetic used to sit before this spin gave me flesh again — and I flex it once at the kitchen counter in Seattle, before dawn, coffee untouched, and I already know I'm going back. Russell's fine. Russell's a good body. Big, useful, quiet ache in the shoulder that isn't unpleasant so much as *present*, always present. That's the trouble with him. One minute in and already I can feel the whole rest of his life sitting there waiting to be lived at his pace — early alarm, long haul, a highway that doesn't end for hours. I didn't take him for the long haul. I took him because he was there and I was restless and it was two in the morning and the wheel doesn't ask why. Now it's morning and the restlessness hasn't left, it's just changed shape, and there is a site with a wheel on it and 765 men behind me and Russell is not going to be the 766th thing that finally makes it stop.

I spin before the coffee's even cold.

—

The tablet screen is angled wrong under his thumb and the thumb corrects it, once, slow, like a man rereading a sentence he definitely just read — and that half-second of wrongness is me, arriving, mid-motion, in a body that is not thick and is not young, that is skinny in the arms and soft through the middle in the particular way of a man who stands twelve hours a day and eats standing up. Reservation book glowing under glass. A pen clipped in a breast pocket, digging faintly into flesh above the heart. Keys at the hip, cold, swinging once against the thigh and going still. Behind me, glass, rain-streaked, a terraced street the color of wet biscuit. In front of me, a dining room filling up on a Friday, low gold light, the particular pressurized hush of a restaurant twenty minutes from being loud.

I check the booking again. Correctly, slowly, checked. Ten more after it come out the same way — checked, checked, checked — on a job that hasn't needed checking in eleven years.

—

The shirt is what opens first — black, cotton gone soft at the elbows from washing, and it gives me an *ironing board*, a small flat in Kentish Town, a radio turned low to a cricket score nobody in this borough cares about but him, a Thursday-morning ritual, iron hissing, collar first then the yoke then the sleeves in an order that has never once varied because varying it feels like carelessness and carelessness is the one thing Faisal Rehman does not permit himself, not since he was twenty-six and careless with the wrong things and lost most of what mattered because of it.

The keys give me the ex. Priya. Six keys on the ring and one of them — small, brass, worn soft — still opens a door that isn't hers anymore, hasn't been for four years, and he has never taken it off the ring and never once tried it. He tells himself it's an accident he hasn't sorted the keys. It is not an accident. It is the one small dishonesty he allows himself, the one thing he does not check and recheck and correct, because checking it would mean deciding something, and there are decisions he has been not-making since he was forty-eight, gently, the way a man avoids a step he knows creaks.

The pen in the pocket gives me the job — eleven years at this address, before that four years somewhere worse, a kitchen manager in Slough who threw a ladle once and Faisal walked out mid-shift and never went back and has never told anyone that story because it makes him sound like a man who can't take a bit of shouting, when actually — and this comes up hot, aggrieved, entirely his — it was never about the shouting. It was about being spoken to like a fixture. He built this room instead. He knows every regular's order before they sit. He knows which four-top likes the corner away from the door and which one needs the door in view. He is good at this the way some men are good at silence.

The barbell in his eyebrow — small, cool, an old thing his fingers find without meaning to when he's thinking — gives me almost nothing, just a flash, a birthday, twenty-something, a dare from someone whose face doesn't come with it, laughing.

And underneath all of it, the body: fifty-two and it tells you so in the lower back after five hours upright, in the knee that clicks on the third stair down to the cellar, in hands that are dry from a hundred thousand handwashes and know, without asking, exactly how to fold a napkin into the shape this restaurant wants, exactly how much pressure a wine cork needs before it's trouble. Not a strong body. Not a weak one. A body that has learned to spend itself carefully because nobody is coming to spend it for him.

—

I look down at his hand on the tablet, my hand now, thin-fingered, a faint white indent where a ring isn't and hasn't been, and I turn it over once like it might have an answer on the back of it. Then I crack the knuckles — his habit, not mine, it just goes and does it — and the little pop of it is the first thing that feels entirely like being here.

I lift my eyes to the glass, to the street, to nothing, and say, to no one, in a voice with an accent I haven't earned yet, "Table four's early."