Raul Dominguez

You are standing in a kitchen in Honolulu before the sun is up, and the knife is already in your hand.

It is a good knife. Daniel Kahananui's hands know it the way they know the stairs, and for forty seconds this morning you have been letting them. The onions are going to be fine. The pass will be fine. Somewhere his wife is asleep, and the walk-in hums in the dark behind you like a held note. You came back to the site anyway, with the phone propped against the flour bin and the little wheel waiting on it. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the part you would not say out loud. He is short and quick and warm, he smells of bay leaf, and you could feel the whole day lined up in him, every hour of it good and already known. You wanted the one you do not know yet.

You set the knife down square to the board, the way he would. Then you press.

Heat. White sky, hard on the eyes, and water running cold across the tops of your feet. Gravel shifts under your boots. A sponge is in your right hand, soaked and heavy, and soap is sliding down a maroon door in wide arcs. Your thumb is tucked. Your wrist is turning small circles, and behind the sponge the paint comes up clean, no swirl, no ghost of a swirl. The hose hisses somewhere to your left. Far out past the roofs a thunderhead is stacking black, and the light has gone the yellow of old paper.

Your back is warm under the shirt. Your breath goes in deep, a lunger's breath, an athlete's gone a little slow. Your knees speak once, politely.

You lean to the door handle, and the cotton of the sleeve pulls across your shoulder. It comes back.

Five-thirty, a dark bedroom, and the shirt off the hook: pale blue, softened by a hundred washes, a button he has sewn back twice. His fingers do the cuffs, left and then right, folding twice. He is not thinking. He is listening to the house be empty. The ring used to go on before the shirt, and now his thumb still goes looking for it and finds the pale band of skin instead, and that small miss is older than any of the rest.

The sponge squeezes, and something else comes up through it. A bench in the shop, a socket wrench passed across to a girl of eleven who held it like a relic. His daughter. There are three of them, or more, and their names come up in his mouth before their faces do. Church on Sundays, the cool of the stone, his knee bent without his deciding. A woman in a doorway, not angry, tired, saying his name the way you set down something heavy. He does not hate her. The not-hating is the sorrow.

Denim at your thighs, stiff from a dozen dryings. The boots he resoled himself. Two bays and a good year behind him, and the account that says he is fine, and nobody to say it to.

Soap runs over the back of your hand, over the inked half sleeve, black and patient, and the arm flexes under it as if it knew it was being watched.

You lift the hand and turn it over. Wet palm, the cut-short nails, the pale band on the ring finger. A stranger's, and yours.

You look up at the yellow sky, the black cloud coming, and say, low, "All right, Raul. Let's see what you do."

The hose keeps running. You do not know how long he lasts.