Peter Sungmin Oh

You are standing in Malik Bryant's kitchen in Honolulu with the light not yet up, and his coffee is going cold in his big freckled hand. Twenty-seven, five-nine, shoulders that carry a ladder like it's nothing. You've had him less than a minute. You wanted a body that could do something, and he does everything, and still your thumb is already on the phone, on the page with the wheel. It isn't him. It's that you stood at his window and the whole island looked like a room you had finished. You press it.

The board clicks to 48.

His knee stops. That's the first thing: a bounce you didn't start, ending under your palm. The strip light hums above the third seat from the door. A paper cup of water, warm now, is in both your hands, and you set it down on the empty seat beside you, square, the way he would. You fold your hands. You do not look up when the name is called, because you don't yet know it's his.

Then the jacket. Green canvas, stiff at the cuffs, and the collar against your neck gives you him at a dark closet that morning, one sleeve and then the other, the wife's hand straightening the collar without comment. Not a kiss. A tug. Something unsaid between them, and the feeling is dread, and under it, tenderness.

The ring is the hand's own business: your thumb is already turning it, round and round, and it hands you a driveway, two small children in the back of a car, a promise made in a church he didn't believe in but his mother did. Spiritual, he'd say, if pressed. He prays to the road sometimes at four a.m., not to anyone.

The scar through his eyebrow itches. A flash: a chain, a loading dock, cold, a boy of nineteen laughing with blood in his eye.

The chair is cold chrome against your back. Your boots, cracked brown leather, are the ones he resoles himself. Five-five, a compact body, thirty-five years in the lower back, a dull ache from the seat of a rig, a strong clean grip. Shaved smooth this morning, the jaw still tight and tender. Somewhere a girl he used to love, recently, is a bruise he presses without meaning to. The savings, small and careful, are a number he recites at night. Whatever the appointment is for, the fear in his stomach is real, and it is not yours, and you carry it anyway.

You lift your hands and look. Square fingers, the band, a callus along the thumb. You turn them over.

You look up, at nothing, at the number.

"Forty-eight," you say, in his low voice. "Huh."

And already, underneath, the quiet question of how long a man like this lasts, and when the wanting comes back.