Kevin Shortall

Harold Yee's kitchen table has a coffee ring on it from a mug that isn't his, and you have been staring at that ring for eleven minutes deciding whether to spin again. His knees ache the way old men's knees ache, a low complaint that never stops, and his caseload is sitting in a folder by the toaster — nine names, nine sad stories, and none of them urgent enough to keep you here. You have had this one for less than a minute of his own time and already the wanting is back, quieter than usual, more like an itch under a cast than a hunger. That's the tell. Seven hundred and sixty-seven men before him and you still can't tell yourself the truth about why, except that Harold is sixty-four and slow getting up from chairs and you are bored of a body before you've even worn it in. You open the laptop. The wheel is already loaded from last night, spinning lazily in place like it's been waiting. You put your thumb on it — Harold's thumb, spotted, a little unsteady — and you let it go.

The fryer basket is rising when you land, oil hissing under it, and your hand — his hand — is already closing on the handle wrong, gripping too high, and you correct it a half-second later, slow and deliberate, the way a man reaches for a doorknob in a house he's never been in. Steam comes up in a wall and behind it, through a propped door, the light outside is white and flat and much too bright for what your body wants to believe about the hour. Ten more baskets go up in the next stretch of shift, and you check every single one — the color, the shake, the drain time — checking things this body has never had to check because this body has done this correctly ten thousand times without asking permission from you.

The polo against your back is still warm from a dryer that ran this morning, and it gives you that first: him standing in a bedroom with the blinds cut into slats of light, pulling this same shirt over his head backward and laughing at himself, quiet, so as not to wake anyone, because 4 a.m. starts are your one truly graveyard shift of the week and the house still smells like the kids' bath from the night before. His name comes with the shirt too, easy as a nametag — Kevin. Kevin Shortall. He buttoned the collar with his eyes half shut, thinking about nothing, which is its own kind of mercy.

The visor gives you the drive in, dark highway going gray, gospel radio low because his wife likes it and he doesn't mind it, three car seats in the back that haven't held a kid in years but nobody's taken them out, a fourth on the way in a month according to the ultrasound magnet stuck to the fridge. The tattoo under the collar — traditional lines, a faded eagle he got at nineteen in a shop that's closed now — gives you a version of him younger, dumber, before the temple, before he cleaned up the drinking he never really had a habit for to begin with, before he understood what it meant to promise something in front of people who'd remember it. The studs in his ears give you nothing but a dare from a cousin, years back, that he never regretted.

His hands know this counter without him. Skinny forearms, a burn scar he doesn't feel anymore on the inside of the left wrist, a body that runs hot and thin no matter what he eats, thirty-six years old and moving like he's got nowhere else better to be at this hour than under fluorescent light with the desert going white outside the door. The wedding band on his left hand is warm, always warm, and it brings his wife's face up whole — not a flash but a full year, the wedding in a stake center gym with folding chairs, her laughing at something the bishop said, three kids since then and a fourth coming, the little turquoise house with the chain-link that he's proud of even though it's worth nothing and everyone knows it. He is not an unhappy man. That lands strange in you, a small weight, because you have worn men who hated their lives and men who loved them and this is neither — this is a man who has simply never once asked whether it's enough. The toothpick isn't in his mouth right now, hands too busy, but his jaw keeps working anyway, chewing at nothing, a habit older than any of it.

You feel for the gap in his teeth with his own tongue, an old boyhood self-consciousness he outgrew before he was twenty, and something in that small private geography makes the wanting in you go quiet for the first time in days.

You look down at his hand on the fryer handle — thin wrist, plain band, a little steam-shine on the knuckles — and you turn it over slow, like it might not hold, and then you lift your eyes to the little dark window in the hood vent that's throwing back just enough of your reflection to count as a mirror, and you say, in his voice, with his gap-toothed almost-smile, "Well — hey there."