Sanjay Kumar Patel

You are standing in a kitchen in Honolulu, in the dark, in Kyle Mercer's body, with the refrigerator humming and a glass of water going warm in his big hand. He has been yours for less than a minute. Six-two, a chemist's soft shoulders, blue eyes in the black window. Nothing is wrong with him. That is what you cannot say aloud, even to yourself: nothing is wrong, and your thumb is already on the site, on the wheel, on the small gold word spin. You were standing in his life and it was too quiet to bear. So you pay.

The wheel clicks. A man is there before the click ends.

Mist off the creek. Gravel under boots. Something is in your right hand, a cardboard tube of drawings, and you are mid-gesture, handing it across to someone whose face you do not see. Your mouth is full of gum, mint gone to rubber. Your jaw keeps working it. The motion in your arm is wrong for half a second, a small lurch, and then you do it again slowly, correctly, and the tube leaves your fingers.

The vest is first. Its fabric is stiff with dust, and where your forearm brushes the reflective strip, it comes: five a.m. in a dark kitchen, these hands pulling the henley over a head going thin on top, the sleeves pushed to the elbow, a wife's voice from the bedroom asking if he took the pills for his knee, and his answer, *yes*, a lie, tender, easy. The zipper. The pencil and folding rule pushed into the chest pocket, the way he has done it since he was twenty-six.

The wedding band turns against your finger and you get a whole evening: a porch, a child asleep on his chest, three of them, the heat of a small head under his chin, and a feeling so wide in his ribs it has no name. Then, thinner, a different woman's laugh, an ex-wife in a driveway years ago, and an ache that is old and has stopped bleeding but still keeps its shape.

The boots. Under your soles the gravel shifts and you are on a different site, younger, a beam coming down wrong, his own shout, nobody hurt. Since then he checks nothing because he has checked everything. You feel it in your hands: ten thousand tasks, eyes elsewhere, knowing. Your belly is heavy over the belt, your knee is stiff, your back is tired before the day has begun, and under it a steady strength, a thick, patient animal that knows how to carry things.

Gum. Your tongue finds a hard piece of it and, behind it, something he never told anyone: the twenty-six thousand dollars in an account his wife does not know is that large, saved for a roof, for a daughter's tuition, for the day something breaks. Nobody knows. It is a quiet, private pride.

The creek runs brown. The footbridge sways. The steel stands in the fog like the ribs of something being born.

You lift your hand and turn it over. Dark skin, broad palm, the ring. Then you raise your eyes, and you say, low, around the gum, "Well. Hello."

Somewhere behind your breastbone the wanting is already asleep, and you do not know how long it sleeps.