Sione Fonoti

You are standing in Jason Tanabe's kitchen in Queens, and the refrigerator hums the way it has hummed for ten days and twenty-three hours. Everyone in the building is asleep. You came out here for water and have not drunk any.

The body is fine. That is the trouble. It is thirty-five and quick and never complains. The nose, broken once and set a little off, whistles faintly when you breathe in the dark. The guard's shoes sit by the door, still tied, as if he might be called. You have worn his night shifts and his bad knee that is not even bad. Tonight you stood at the window and felt nothing wanting you back. Nothing was wrong with him. You were only finished, the way you finish a room. You open the page and the wheel is already turning.

Then the refrigerator hum is gone, and there is a different quiet.

You are standing at a counter in the dark with a phone in your right hand and a thumb stopped on a price. It is more than a month of rent. Your left palm is flat on cool glass. Your thumb lifts and stays lifted. You turn the phone face-down, and the hand that sets it there is heavy and warm and does not pick it back up.

The weight is the first thing. You are lower to the ground and wider through the middle, and your breath goes down deep and comes back slow. The nose is crooked in a way you can feel from the inside, one nostril narrower, a small whistle on the left.

The flannel is against your shoulders, soft from washing. When you pull it closed over the gray T-shirt, a morning opens that is not yours. He is sitting on the edge of a bed in the dark at four-fifteen, easing his feet into the khakis one leg at a time so he won't wake her. His knees complain and he lets them. The belt is the brown one with the cracked keeper. He thumbs the flannel buttons wrong, then right. He is so tired and so careful, and under it is a quiet pride that nobody has ever asked about.

Your fingers find the counter's edge. The calluses are thick across the base of each finger, the palms hard as boot leather, and they remember a shovel handle. You know it the way you know a stair in your own house. A trench opens. Wet coral rock, the mini excavator coughing diesel, spoil piled to his hip, and a boy of twenty on the crew calling him Uncle. He likes it and pretends not to. There is the cigarette he gave up eleven years ago, and the ache of it still sits behind his teeth at ten at night.

You shift your feet. The sneakers are soft inside, the heels worn down on the outside edge. Through them comes a hallway with a child's height marks penciled on the doorframe. Two names, two colors of pencil. A woman's voice says his name once, tired, and not in anger. The ex-wife. You get no argument from it, only the feeling of having been forgiven for something and not being sure you deserve it. Then another woman's slippers on the tile, the one asleep down the hall now. She taught him to leave the lamp on, and the lamp is on.

The watch on the screen was for no one in particular. You see it now: a Saturday, a church lobby, a man in a good watch shaking his hand, and Sione looking at his own wrist, bare. He wanted to be a man whose wrist said something. The wanting is small and has no malice in it. It lives in his chest beside the rosary in a dresser drawer and the knee and the two children's phone numbers memorized.

You lift your hands into the lamplight. They are broad and brown with dirt in the creases that no soap will ever fully lift. You turn them over. They are not yours. They are not his now either.

You look up at the black window and your own reflection there, gray-silver, crooked-nosed, sixty-one.

"Okay," you say, in a voice lower than you expected. "Okay, Sione."

The phone lies face-down on the counter. Somewhere you can already feel the page, patient, waiting for the wanting to come back. Tomorrow, tonight, in four minutes. You do not know how long he will fit.