Peter Nakagawa

---

You know the sound of him before you know anything else.

Gum. That soft wet click at the back of the molars, three beats and a pause, three beats and a pause, the metronome of thirty-one years. Peter Nakagawa chewing while he drives, chewing while he counts packages, chewing while he tells you that you look like garbage, buddy, when are you going to eat something. You used to want to throw the pack out the window. Now it is the first thing you hear from inside him, and it is like walking into your mother's kitchen.

He came here for you. That's the part you can't put down.

Nine weeks in the ground and he still won't accept it, and the woman on Calle Ocho with the star tapestries and the one candle told him she could reach across, and he paid her in twenties out of the envelope he keeps in the glovebox for tolls and emergencies, and he sat down across that folding table with his hands flat on the wood like a man waiting to be sentenced. He asked her: *is he all right.* Not *is he there.* Is he all right. Fifty years old, high blood pressure, two kids, a mortgage he could pay off tomorrow if he wanted to, a girlfriend asleep three miles away with the balcony door open to the ocean haze, and he spent his Tuesday night asking a stranger whether you were comfortable.

She turned the card. You watched his face do the thing his face does — the eyebrows staying still, the mouth going flat, the cleft in his chin deepening the way it did the one time you ever saw him cry, at his father's funeral, twelve years old, gum in his cheek even then. On the card was his own face. Not a painted knight, not a fool with a dog. Him. The shapeless black hair over the ears, the brown eyes, the chin.

The old hands withdrew into the lace. He stared at it. He was still trying to be polite about it — you could see him deciding it was a trick, deciding what to say, *okay, that's a good one, how much extra* — and then the face on the card looked back at him.

And then you did.

You don't want to describe it as arriving. It was more like a room you'd been standing outside of for nine weeks opening from the other side. The blood pressure came first, that pushing behind the eyes he never mentioned to anyone but you. Then the ache in the right shoulder from the van door. Then the gum, going soft and sweet and useless. Then the weight of a body that had gone to the gym at 5 a.m. for three decades and had it to show, all of it, five foot eight and every inch used.

Then his hands. On the table. Brown, weathered, the calluses down the palm where the hand truck rides, the nails cut short and square. You picked one up and turned it over and it came, and that was the worst second of your life and the best, both, and you don't know how to separate them and you never will.

Because he isn't in here. You looked. You looked the way you'd look for a man in a burning house. You went through all of it — the ex-wife's number still in the phone under her first name only, the kids' school pickup times, the rosary in the cupholder that he never prayed with but wouldn't move, the sound of his girlfriend saying *Petey* in the doorway. It's all here. It's all yours. He isn't.

You didn't ask for this. That is the sentence you will repeat to yourself in the pastel dark on that balcony while the neon runs on the wet tile below, and it will be true, and it will not help. You asked for nothing. You were dead. He came to a table with a candle on it and put his hands down and paid money to hear that his friend was all right, and something in the room heard the wanting in him and gave it the only shape it had.

Fifty years old, and now you're the one who gets them. The two kids. The girl. The van at 6 a.m. with the roll-up door going bang against its track and the smell of the harbor and the cardboard. Thirty more years of a body he built and never got to finish using.

You will do it well. You swear that to him at the table, out loud, in his voice, which is the strangest thing you have ever heard. You will take the blood pressure pills he keeps skipping. You will drink the few times a year he drinks and not more. You will go to the Mass he goes to, and you will kneel there like an intruder in your own coat, and you will not tell his girlfriend anything, ever, because there is no version of telling her that is a kindness.

And you will keep chewing the gum. Not because you like it — you never liked it. Because it's him, doing three beats and a pause somewhere behind your teeth, and it's the only part of him you know how to keep.

The candle is still going. The woman's hands are gone under the table. She isn't looking at you.

You lift his hand and turn it over and look at the lines in it and think: *buddy, what did you do.*