Paul Nakamura

You are Kevin Tran, and the kitchen has gone wrong in your hands. The knife is fine. The stock is fine. It is the other thing: you have been twenty-four for less than a minute of your own counting, and already you know what the back of this body wants. It wants to stand at the pass until close and call it a life. The beauty mark, the patchy beard you keep touching, the quick cook's wrists. All of it works. None of it is the thing you came for. Somewhere a ticket printer is chattering, and you are standing very still in the middle of it with the phone already open to the wheel.

You press it. Mid-morning light, an Ohio Tuesday, goes out of you like a held breath.

Now there is a strip light, humming. A folding chair under you, cold through the seat of your jeans. A paper cup between your fingers, the water in it gone lukewarm. Across the room a whiteboard clicks to 48, and the knee that was bouncing stops on the same click. You set the cup down square on the little desk-arm. You fold your hands. Nobody has called a name yet. You do not look up.

The cloth comes first. A black thermal shirt, soft at the cuffs, and the cuff against your wrist gives you a morning: a dark bedroom, a woman's back turned in sleep, his own hands finding this shirt on the chair by feel so as not to wake her. Left sleeve, then right. Then the jeans, stiff at the knee with dried clay, and the memory of sitting on a driveway curb in a new subdivision, pulling them on over cold legs, pickup ticking behind him as the engine cooled. He keeps a pen in the thigh pocket. Your finger finds it and clicks it, click, click, and you realize that is what the hand does when he is not thinking. It is how he waits. It is how he waited outside the delivery room, twice, the second time with the pen dead and still clicking.

The ring is warm against the next finger over. Under it a year opens: a kitchen, a woman laughing with her mouth shut because of something he said, and the dimples. You feel them now, deep in your cheeks, rising even though nothing is funny. They arrive without asking, a family trait his daughter inherited. He has been told he looks pleased when he is only resting.

The chair back presses your spine, and there it is, the real ache: forty-eight years of bulldozer track vibration lodged low in the back, a stiffness in the right shoulder from the lever. The body is strong and compact, athletic in the plain way of a man who lifts nothing for show. Your hair slides on your neck, long and gray, and you remember him refusing the barber for eleven years because his father wore it short and died young anyway. He quit drinking at forty. A cigar on Sundays, on the back step, alone. He prays to nothing loudly, but he bows to a small gold figure on a shelf, and you feel the habit in your neck.

Why is he here? A number on a board, and under it fear he has not told her. A test. Results. His thumb is working the pen in the pocket so hard it hurts. He is frightened, and he is brave about it in the way of men who sit very still.

You open your eyes. You lift your hands from your lap and turn them over, the left, the ring, the broad scarless palm, the clay in the creases. They are warm. They are yours.

You look up, and you say, softly, "Okay. Let's see what you were afraid of."

And underneath it, the quiet question you cannot answer: how long. An hour, a decade, until the wanting comes back and the wheel starts turning again.