Lonnie Whitecotton

Darius Whitlow's thumb is already at his mouth when you decide. You catch it there, the nail half gone, and realize it isn't his habit. It's yours, and it came in with him. Twenty years old and heavy, with stubble you keep rubbing, and in less than a minute you have learned the only thing he could not give you. His mother is on the speaker in the kitchen, and the voice is saying come home, and you keep waiting to feel it as yours. You don't. You feel a stranger's sorrow set down in the wrong house. The wheel is open on the screen. Pay, spin.

You are crouched. The air is warm and smells of hot cotton and detergent. A fluorescent tube hums above you, and your knees are bent deep and do not complain. One sock is in your right hand, gray, with a thin heel. The dryer's mouth breathes on your forearm.

You pull the load out. It is warm against your chest, and the first memory comes up through the cloth. A woman's laugh, upstairs, over the sound of the news, and the particular ease of a man who is allowed to leave his boots by the door. Her name is Carla, and it arrives as a feeling before it arrives as a word. You drop the clothes in the basket.

Then your hands go on without you. They fold fast and square, corners to corners, a towel in thirds, a shirt flipped and snapped. His mother taught him this at a table in a kitchen with a window unit rattling, and the shame of a creased sleeve is older than the job. There are eight crumpled shirts in a drawer upstairs, and he leaves them crumpled out of some small rebellion that you feel and cannot name. The gray shirt on your back is damp at the spine. He put it on this morning in the dark, left arm first because the shoulder is stiff, and he stood a second in the hall listening to her breathe.

The ink on your upper arm pulls when you reach, black and tribal, half under the sleeve. A flash of a needle and an uncle's quiet pride. The jeans hold the day's dirt at the knees. Trench dirt, red clay, a mini excavator's tired diesel clatter, the shovel handle worn smooth where his palm goes. Your thumbnail goes to your teeth and finds almost nothing there. You've been him thirty seconds and you are already biting what he bit.

The body is heavy and solid, a good engine with a bad left knee and a back that has been honest with him for years. His shaved scalp is cool under the light. There's no drink in the memory anywhere. It left him once, like a tide, and he never went after it.

You look at your hands. Wide palms, nails bitten, a sock still in one of them. You turn them over. They are steady.

You look up and say, to nobody, to the basement: "Okay. Okay, this one's warm."

The dryer ticks as it cools. Upstairs a floorboard creaks and a woman's voice calls his name, and you don't know yet whether it's going to be yours.