Samir Haddad

You are two minutes into being Manuel Otis, sitting on a stool in his garage in Dallas with the bay door half-open to the heat going out of the day, and already the honest truth is you do not want him. Sixty-five is fine, you have worn older, but the goatee itches in a way that is not his itch and yours to keep, and there is a arthritic click in the left knee that arrived the second you did and has not stopped since, and somewhere under the ribs is a decision Manuel made forty years ago that you can feel the weight of without knowing its shape — a debt, maybe, or a son he doesn't call. You didn't take him for any of that. You took him because the number was low and the face was kind and you were somewhere between men and needed to be someone. Two minutes was long enough. You reach into the coverall pocket for his phone to check the time and your fingers already know where the pocket is before you do, and that, more than the knee, is what decides it — his hands are getting ahead of you, which means you are starting to become him instead of merely wearing him, and that has never once been what you wanted. You open vessel.cards on his phone with his thumbprint, which somehow works, and you spin.

The knife is already coming down when you arrive, and your hand — his hand — corrects itself mid-cut, the blade skipping wrong through a carrot and then, a beat later, cutting it again slow and deliberate, the way you'd teach someone. You feel the mesh glove tight across the knuckles, the cold coming up off the steel table into your forearms, the apron strap crossing at the back of your neck, damp with a day's sweat. Behind you, through a window, the cul-de-sac holds the last flat gold of evening, heat still sitting on the driveways. Ten more cuts come out checked, each one, dice, dice, dice, your eyes on the blade for the first time in years though they don't know why.

The apron strap is the first thing that opens him: a Tuesday morning, mirror in the back hallway of his mother's house, looping the strap over his head and thinking about nothing, thinking about the Fulton Street bus, his mother's radio already going in the kitchen, some Lebanese station low under the news. He tied his boots sitting on the stairs because the front step was wet with dew and he didn't want to ruin new socks. The boots know how to be tied by these hands without being watched — laced twice, tucked, no bow to catch on a rack. His body is twenty-four and unbroken, quick in the shoulders, a runner's flat stomach even though he doesn't run, and it likes to move, likes the particular tiredness of eight hours on his feet rather than the ache Manuel's knee gave you two minutes and a lifetime ago.

The knife handle gives you the job whole: three years at this table, a boss named Dana who calls him "chef" as a joke that isn't unkind, the AC that never quite beats the kitchen's own heat by three in the afternoon. He is good here. He has always been good with his hands doing something in front of him — it's only when someone is watching, when it matters in a room with other people looking, that they stutter, drop a word, drop a glass. Nobody is watching him cut carrots. That's why this job fits him like the glove does.

The tattoo on his calf, under the sock, under the boot, gives you an afternoon in a shop off Buford Highway, nineteen years old, his mother not knowing yet, his own hands pressed together in the stencil before the needle ever touched down, because he wanted something that would still be true of him even on the days he doubted the rest. Spiritual, not exactly religious — he talks to something most nights, just not in a building for it.

And under his shirt, against your back where the fabric sits, one more thing surfaces, unbidden, the way the good ones do: a man's name, not said aloud in years, a laugh across a bar that closed two summers ago, a decision neither of them made in time. The one who got away. It comes with an ache that isn't yours and you let it sit there anyway, because it's his and this is the only way you get to have it.

You set the knife down flat on the cutting board, the carrots half-finished in their bright orange coins, and you turn your palm up in front of your face — his hand, olive-brown, a thin white scar along one knuckle you didn't put there and don't know the story of yet. You turn it over once, slow, like you're checking it's real.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty prep kitchen, to nobody. "Okay."

You don't know for how long. You never do.