Phillip Nguyen

Kenneth Mori's kitchen is dark except for the light over the stove, and you are standing at the counter in his bare feet with his reading glasses pushed up into his gray hair. The laptop is open. The wheel is on the screen, still.

You did not come down here because he was bad. He was fine. His wife's breathing upstairs was slow and even, and his knees were sound, and the house had that quiet that comes from a good life. But you had stood in his closet an hour ago, running his moustache between two fingers, and every suit in it was the right size and not one of them had a thing to tell you. A man with a pension and a pleasant marriage. You had read the whole of him by the second day. Something in you went on wanting, and he had nothing left to give it. You wouldn't say that out loud even to an empty kitchen.

You press the key. The wheel goes.

Then the aisle.

Green steel upright against your shoulder, a cardboard corner under your right palm, a forklift beeping somewhere past the racking where you can't see it. You are mid-reach. Your arm knows the box before you do, and it's wrong. Your hand puts it a half-inch off the pallet edge. You fix it slowly, deliberately. Then you check it, and check the next one, and the next, ten of them, each a thing his hands have not needed to do in years.

The air is thick and tastes of dust and cut cardboard. Your lungs feel scratchy and a little tight. A pack a day sits in them like a hand. You are small in this body, light, skinny, and everything is closer than you expected: the shelf at your eye, the floor nearer. Your calves burn quietly from hours on concrete. Your shoulders are knotted up high.

The scanner strapped to your forearm is warm. You touch the strap and it comes at you without asking: a Saturday, a small girl on his hip whose weight he knows better than his own, her sticky fist in the collar of this very shirt, her mouth saying his name in two syllables. A flood of love, so plain it makes your throat close.

The polo against your back is damp and thin, washed soft. Sleeve by sleeve it gives you the morning: standing in a cramped bedroom, tugging the navy over his head because it was the cleanest, pulling the orange vest on last, the Velcro rasp, a cigarette already between his lips on the walk to the car. He wanted to be anywhere else and was not sorry about it.

You rub your thumb over your fingertips. They tremble a little, a hitch, a stutter that comes whenever someone watches. Under that, an old name: a man who used to laugh in a kitchen, a boyfriend years gone, whose number he still hasn't deleted. It aches in him like a tooth.

Your fingers curl against the cardboard. The beeping gets closer.

You lift your hand and look at it. Thin brown fingers, calloused at the base, a stranger's. You turn it over. Then you look up into the dark mouth of the dock door and say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."