Rahul Khanna

Paul Gervasi's nose aches before the weather turns. It was broken once, and it knows things. I am standing at the block in the back of the shop with a boning knife and a pork shoulder, and the whole cut is wrong in my hands. The knife knows the seam. I don't. For thirty-three days I have been a man whose hands know everything and whose mind knows nothing, and tonight a customer says "Paulie, you've gone quiet on us," and nobody in that shop is wrong about me but me. The wife of a man I've never met comes in on Fridays and calls me honey. She asks about a daughter I can't find. I say fine, fine, and wrap her chops in white paper the way the hands want to. I wash up. I take off the apron he wore. I sit in his truck with the engine off and the phone open to the page with the wheel, and I do not tell myself why. It was her, the honey. It was how kind it was. Pay. Spin.

It is a kitchen. The knife is gone and a wooden spoon is turning in my right hand, mid-circle, and the circle is wrong, so I reverse it. Heat on the face. Onions, cumin, hot oil. A window full of late gold. My weight is on the left foot and I did not put it there. Six feet of him, easy and a little tired, long in the back. I salt the pan without looking and I don't taste it. The hand is certain. I take down a second plate and set it beside the first, and I do not know why, and the hand does not either.

The floor comes up through his sneakers, cool tile through thin soles, and with it a flash that is his and not mine: the morning, the shirt. The gray tee off the chair, the collar stretched from years of being pulled over his head one-handed. The jeans from the hook, button fly, the belt he skipped. He stood on this tile with one sock on, reading something on a phone, and was happy for no reason. Then the counter's edge presses my hip and a second thing opens: a checkout lane, the belt running, the red beam of the scanner dragging across a thousand cans of chickpeas, and a lanyard against his chest that he hates and wears anyway. Eleven hours of saying "Paper or plastic?" and meaning it kindly. His feet ache, and now so do mine.

The spoon handle is smooth, worn pale where his thumb sits. I take it and I'm in the night he bought it, a market, her laughing at him for haggling over a spoon. Her. The ring on my left hand is a plain band, warm from the stove. When I turn it with my thumb the whole marriage comes loose at once. A small apartment, a radiator that knocks. Her hair in his mouth. A fight about nothing, a long silence, a made-up bed. Prayer on the folded towel by the window, his forehead on the floor, the quiet he finds there that I have never once found anywhere. Nobody has told me why there is one plate too many tonight. Then it comes, through the plate's cool rim under my fingertips: she is coming home. Or she is not. Both plates are the same hope. And behind her, older, a different woman, the one who got away, her name sitting in his chest like a swallowed stone he has carried for ten years without once saying it aloud. I do not take it out. It is not mine to take.

The pan hisses. A toothpick is in my other hand, or in the pocket, or his mouth wants one. The jaw knows. Fresh-shaven, smooth under my palm, he did it this morning at the sink with the radio on. Savings in a quiet account, not much, enough that he feels held. Curls dropping into his eyes. A back that is strong and a left knee that is not quite.

I lift my hands. They are brown, long-fingered, steady, the band bright on the left. I turn them over. They are lovely and they are not mine, and I am so tired of being someone's guest.

I look up at the window, at the gold going out of the glass.

"Okay," I say, in a voice that is warm and low and wrong in my throat. "Okay, Rahul."

The spoon turns once more on its own. I wonder how long before I want out again, and whether I will still be here when the second plate goes cold.