Jamal Fenwick

Raymond Yoshida's knees are the reason, though I would not say so to anyone. Fifty-five years of them, and this morning in the yard in Rural Texas they locked halfway out of a crouch beside a sprinkler head, and I knelt there with dirt under the gloves and the sun on my gray head and thought: there it is, the thing he could always do and I cannot. He had been mine for less than a minute when I found it. Not a minute of him, really. A minute of a stranger's cough and a stranger's good coffee going cold on a truck hood. I did not want a body that argued. I did not want to be the man kneeling there. The phone was in his shirt pocket. The wheel was already open on it, turning, before I had decided anything.

Then the sheet.

A corner of white cotton in my gloved left hand, the fitted edge pulled halfway off the mattress, and I am standing in it, mid-pull, my weight on the back foot. The air is cold and smells of lemon cleaner and old sun. My arm finishes the motion wrong, a yank where there should be a glide, and I stop. Glass in front of me, a balcony beyond it, pink and mint buildings, a flat bright haze over the sea. I do it again, slowly, the way you would show someone. Correct. Then the next corner, checked. Then the next. My hands want to hurry and I do not let them.

The blue glove is tight at the wrist and damp inside, and the damp comes with something: a locker room, the box of gloves bought with his own money because the hotel's tear. A woman's voice, his supervisor, saying his name like a short sentence. Jamal. Jamal, the fourth floor is backed up.

The shirt moves across my shoulders when I reach, gray, stiff at the collar, zip down the front. Under my fingers the zipper pull is cool. And he comes: this morning, a small apartment, a window unit rattling, the shirt on a hanger on the back of the door. He ironed it. Nobody ironed these, and he did. Left arm in, right arm in, the zip up slow to the throat, a hard blink at the mirror, a habit, a clearing of his throat like a man about to speak in church. He said a prayer there, short, mostly the same words, for the bills, for the knee of a coworker, for nothing special. The trousers were black and soft with washing, belt notched where he had gotten leaner and then thicker again. The shoes he polished on Sunday after service, newspaper spread on the floor.

My feet hurt in them. A good hurt, deep in the arches, hours old. The thighs are strong, the back long and easy, the shoulders full of work that has no ache in it yet. Twenty-three. I bend and nothing locks. I almost laugh at that.

I touch the cart handle. Rubber, worn smooth where his palm goes. Money: a number in his head like a stone in a shoe, rent due, a cousin he owes, a little saved in a coffee can that he does not call saving. Balcony light on wet tile, neon from last night's rain still pooled in the grout, a pink sign in a window across the way. A beer, two beers, one night a month when he lets go with friends and wakes up ashamed and tender. Nobody waiting at home. A mother calling on Sundays. The ten thousandth bed.

I look down. His hands, in blue gloves, hold white cotton. I turn them over. Broad palms, calluses under the latex, the knuckles dark and clean and quiet.

I look up at the glass and the haze, and at the face that is in it.

"Okay," I say, and his voice is lower than I expected, warm, a little hoarse. "Okay. You're mine."

Then the question under it, the one I never ask out loud: how long. The knee that works, the morning that is mine. Whether, when the wanting comes back, I will still be standing in this light.