Raymond Dale Kimbrough

Sione Taufa's knees have started to ache by the end of the second day, and that is not the reason. The reason is the walk-in at the back of the restaurant, a stack of sheet pans taller than he is, and the stupid hour he spent last night standing at the sink thinking: I could do this forever, and I'd be nothing, scrubbing someone else's mess in a body that is only borrowed. His cleft chin in the mirror. His big quiet shoulders. He does not hate any of it. That is what he cannot say. He is simply done being a man who is good at this, and it is Monday afternoon, and the spin is already turning.

Then the steam.

You are standing at a three-bay sink with a spray nozzle in your right hand, water running over something white. A plate. The hose is heavy and the rubber gloves are slick and hot, and your leg is bouncing. It is bouncing now, under the apron, a small constant tremor, and you stop it and it starts again. Your hand has already rinsed the plate once. It does it again, slowly, correctly, as if you were checking. Then the next. Ten times, each one carefully, though the hands could do it blind.

The air is wet and tastes of bleach and gravy. Sun comes sideways through the window. Past the glass there is gravel, a line of barbed wire, a water tower far off over flat land.

The apron string cuts across the back of your neck, and the cotton under it comes alive. A morning. He stands in a kitchen that smells of coffee and a woman's lotion, pulling the gray T-shirt over his head, left arm first because the right shoulder catches. She is saying something from the bedroom and he does not answer, because he is listening to her voice, and he knows he has done this for thirty years and will do it tomorrow. The wedding band is warm under the glove. You turn it with your thumb and a different woman crosses him, years back, a screen door, summer, the one who got away, laughing as she walks off down a road like this one. He did not follow. The ache of that sits in his chest like a swallowed stone, quiet, old, finished.

The nozzle handle. Under your thumb it gives you a daughter at a kitchen table, grown now and far away, handing him a phone so he can see her new apartment, and his pride is so big he can't speak, so he says the walls look straight. The mat under your boots is sticky and cushioned. It gives you ten thousand mornings of the same standing, the dull burn at the arches, the lower back that tightens by noon. His nose throbs faintly, the old break, a fistfight in a parking lot at nineteen that he never regrets and never tells about. There is money, more than anyone would guess, folded away in land and quiet accounts, and he washes dishes anyway because the work is the only thing that holds his hands still.

Your body is soft around the middle and thin in the arms, fifty-five years of it. The hair brushes your collar. The moustache moves when you breathe.

You lift your right hand from the water and look at it. Red, wrinkled, a ring on the other. You turn it over. Then you raise your eyes to the window, to the water tower, and say, low, "Well. Hello, Raymond."

The leg keeps bouncing. Somewhere there is a wheel, and you do not know how long before you want it again.