Samir Haddad Khoury

Dennis's kitchen is dark, and I am standing in it with his coffee going cold in his big mechanic's hand. The gray in his goatee catches the stove light in the window glass. He has been mine less than a minute. Already I know what is wrong with him: he is fine. The body works. The knees don't complain. But I was at the counter reading a name on a envelope someone had left for him, a stranger's kindness written in a stranger's hand, and I understood I would never be asked about any of it. Nobody would ask me. So I opened the page with the wheel on it, and here is the thumb, still deciding.

Then I am not in the kitchen.

My arms are full of weight. A wooden crate, edge cutting into the crook of my left arm, carrots and potatoes shifting against each other. My right hand is mid-reach, and it has done something wrong, a carrot tossed that missed the place it should go. Sun on my head, a hat brim shading my eyes. The air smells of turned dirt and wet leaves. I do it again, slowly, and correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, though this is work that has not needed checking in years.

Now the things come, through touch.

The shirt on my back is chambray, soft from a thousand washes, and in its collar I get the morning: Samir at the edge of a bed in the dark, buttoning from the bottom, the way his mother taught him, so the placket never sits crooked. His wife asleep, one foot out from the blanket. He rolled the sleeves twice, to the elbow, because the left cuff is frayed and he is stubborn about it. The bandana he knots without a mirror. His fingers know the knot.

The wood of the crate is rough and splintered at one corner, and it gives me a cold October: two children small enough to ride the stacked crates like a train, shrieking, and him pretending to be angry, a pleasure so deep it feels like standing in warm water. Under my boots the dirt is soft and the stairs behind me, concrete, public, run up between the backyards. He climbs them every night. Wet leaves slide on them. In the late light he stops halfway, just to breathe, and he crosses himself, quickly, at the church bell down the hill.

The ring on my left hand is plain, and when my thumb turns it there is a girl before his wife, a laugh on a porch, a letter he never answered. It does not hurt. It is a room he visits rarely and leaves the light off in.

My chin, when I touch it with the back of my wrist, has the deep cleft in it, smooth from this morning's razor. My body is short, hard, forty years of lifting in it. My lower back has a low, patient ache. My shoulders feel built for this one task.

I put the crate down on the dirt. I turn my right hand over. Brown, scarred at the knuckle, strong, a stranger's, and mine.

I look up, at the lens of the sun, and say, "Samir," just to hear the name sit in the mouth.

How long, I wonder. Until the wanting returns. Until tomorrow. Until the next time my thumb remembers the page.