Kenji Otsuki

Dale Brubaker's kitchen smells like the lake even though the lake is four miles off — mud and gasoline and the inside of a cooler that never quite dries out. You have been him two days and you already know the smell of his hands, which is fish and Marlboro Reds, and you already know the ache in his lower back from hauling nets that are not, strictly speaking, nets he needs to haul anymore, because sixty bucks an hour of somebody else's charter money doesn't require it, but Dale does it anyway because Dale doesn't know how to stand on a boat and not work.

That's the thing you found out today. Two days isn't long, but it was long enough to learn there isn't much else here. Dale watches the same fishing show reruns at nine with a beer he only half-finishes because a few times a year is a limit you feel in his mouth, not just his memory of one. Dale calls his daughter and she doesn't pick up. Dale goes to bed early. You spun him up from the wheel wanting something and by the second night you understood, wearing him, exactly what the something wasn't: this. A bald head under a ball cap, a bad back, a porch light over a gray lake going down slow. Fine for a rest. Not a place to live.

So you're standing at his kitchen counter, in his flannel-soft gut and his tired shoulders, one hand on the laptop, the cursor already on the site. vessel.cards. The wheel sitting there mid-spin from muscle memory more than intention, the way your thumb finds a lighter in a pocket. You don't examine it too hard. You never do. Boredom is a small word for what it is, but it's the only word Dale would have had for it, so it's the one you use.

You click.

—

The dark comes down like a lid.

There was a candle, and now there is smoke, thin and straight, rising off a wick that isn't burning anymore, and you are the one holding it an inch off pale frosting, between two fingers that are not Dale's fingers — thinner, no callus ridge along the thumb, no grit worked into the whorls. A second breath goes into a chest that already emptied itself blowing the first one out, involuntary, greedy, yours. The overhead light is off. Whatever light there is comes low and warm from somewhere behind you, a lamp maybe, and it throws your shadow long over white icing that says something in red gel you can't read yet because your eyes haven't caught up to being these eyes.

You are bent at the waist. There's a table edge biting faintly into your palms where they'd been braced. You are twenty-one years old in every way that matters to a body — you can feel it in how little effort the bend cost, how the knees don't argue.

—

The shirt is doing the talking first. Flannel, soft from washing, one sleeve rolled to the elbow and the other not yet, and that half-done rolling comes back whole: this morning — his morning, six, seven hours behind wherever Dale's lake sits in the day — Kenji standing in front of a mirror over a dresser with a chipped edge, rolling the left sleeve, getting distracted by a text, walking to the kitchen with the right one still buttoned at the wrist, meaning to finish it and never finishing it, the way small unimportant things get left all day and never bother anyone. It didn't bother him either. You feel that in the shoulder — not urgency, just abandonment, mild and easy.

The candle in your fingers keeps giving. It's a birthday candle and the memory that comes with it isn't decorated, isn't a party — there's a grocery store cake with his name spelled slightly wrong in frosting, bought by his mother two hours ago from the bakery counter at the Kroger on Gratiot, and there's the particular tiredness in his legs that says he came here straight from a shift, sand still somewhere in the creases of him even under these clothes, sunscreen smell ghosting under the flannel's fabric softener. The stand. The whistle. Hours of white noise — wind, gulls, somebody's radio three towels down, the lake so flat today it looked painted — followed by his mother's kitchen and a cake that is a little sad and completely hers, bought because she remembers every year even when he says don't bother.

Under your bare feet, the linoleum is worn soft in one long strip in front of the sink, the path of ten thousand small trips for water, and that groove of familiarity comes up through your soles like a name you already know. This body: skinny fat, soft through the middle in a way that has nothing to do with strength and everything to do with what strength it does have — legs that know how to run a soft-sand sprint without thinking, shoulders trained by nothing but two seasons of paddling a rescue board out past the break and back. Whistle-weight muscle. Not gym-built. Beach-built, sun-built, the kind of fit that comes from standing in one place for four hours at a stretch scanning water until your eyes ache behind the sunglasses, then having to move fast for eleven seconds when it matters.

You feel, distantly and without being asked for it, the whole taste of the job: the particular boredom of a slow Tuesday, a kid who went out too far and came back on his own before Kenji even had to blow the whistle, the one real save two Augusts ago that he still doesn't talk about because talking about it makes his hands shake a little even now, even just remembering it secondhand through you. A pack a day comes back as a plain fact in the lungs — not a craving yet, just a shape they're used to holding. No ring anywhere on this hand. No one waiting up. A phone somewhere in these jeans with nobody in it he'd call an ex, because there isn't one, not really, just a couple of things that didn't become anything.

Behind you a chair scrapes — his mother, maybe, saying something about the wish, and it lands in the room the way sound lands after you've been underwater.

—

You straighten up. You look at the hand holding the candle — smooth-fingered, unmarked, faint pink wax drip cooling on the pad of one finger — and you turn it over slow in the low light like it's a coin you're checking for a date.

You look up into whatever's holding still in front of you, cake smoke still climbing between you and it, and you say, in a voice that isn't Dale's low gravel anymore but something younger, unbroken-in:

"Guess I got my wish."