Paul Kaleo Hendricks

You are standing in Aaron Redcorn's kitchen, and his body is already wrong for you. It has been less than a minute. The linoleum is cold through his socks, the coffee maker ticks, and the light over the Ohio fields hasn't decided on a color. His broken nose whistles on every breath. His shoulders are wide and soft and heavy, a laborer's, and they ache from a day he hasn't worked yet. You have been him for less than a minute and you already know it will not be enough. You can't say why. Maybe it is that he is thirty-two and you can feel all the years he has left, a long flat road of them. Maybe it is that you keep reaching for something in him and finding only the weight. You don't say it out loud. You open the page. The wheel turns, and the kitchen goes.

Cold carpet under one knee, then both. The room is dim and smells of old wool and a snuffed cigar, sweet and burnt. Your hands are loosely together, and the left one has a ring on it. You are mid-laugh. It is already leaving your mouth and you did not make it. A clock on the nightstand says 3:14 in red. He was getting up. You were getting up. His knees are fifty-four, and they say so.

The T-shirt against your back is soft from a thousand washes, and it gives you the first thing: a hand pulling it from a drawer in the dark so as not to wake her. Her, the wife. A shape under the blankets, breathing. The care of it is his, a tenderness so practiced it has no thought in it. Then the carpet under your knee, and the memory comes from below: kneeling here on this same pattern years ago, small shoes, a child's bedtime prayer, his big hand over a smaller one. Two children. They're grown now, and the house is quiet in a way he hasn't forgiven.

You shift, and your jaw has been clenched, your teeth pressed together. The body does it on its own, and with it comes a flood of reasons he never said aloud. The shop, the two bays under the house, the steep driveway where a customer's car once rolled. The rag in the back pocket you aren't wearing. The work ground into the knuckles. You press your thumb against the ring, and the metal gives you a Saturday: a borrowed church hall, her laughing at his tie, salt air, his mother's family singing in a language he only half has. The ink at your collar prickles. Its meaning comes up through the skin: his grandfather's island, a promise made at twenty to be someone who remembered.

The nightstand holds a glass of water, a cigar band, a few coins. You don't touch them. You don't need to. The scar through the eyebrow itches, and you know it, a wrench slipping at nineteen, blood in his eye, and his own father laughing and then not laughing. There is a woman before the wife, a name that surfaces and sinks. He thinks of her once a year and never says. The prayer was not serious. He talks to something because the dark is large and he is not a churchgoer, only a man who likes to say thanks. He has never touched a drink in his life. He thought it was enough, this life, and mostly it was.

You look at your hands. Thick fingers, a ring, and grease in the creases that no soap will lift. You turn them over. You lift your eyes.

"Well," you say, in his low voice, and it is strange in your mouth. "Hello, Paul."

Somewhere behind the want there's already the question: how long. An hour, a week. Whether the wanting wakes before the sun does.