Sione Taufa

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The drywall dust is still in Adrián Mercado's throat when you decide.

Two days and fifteen hours in him, and you've learned the shape of it already: a contractor's phone buzzing with the same three clients, a truck that needs brakes, a mother who calls at six wanting to know if you've eaten. You stand in his kitchen at the end of a Wednesday with a beer you don't really want, because he only drinks a few times a year and this doesn't feel like one of the times, and you think about how his hands know drywall mud and stud finders and nothing else, how his whole life is measured in eighths of an inch. It isn't bad. It's just small. You spun this one in a hurry, greedy after the last, and now the greed wants feeding again, the way it always does once the newness rubs off — usually around the second day, like a rash. You open the laptop on his counter, go to the page with the wheel on it, and you pay, and you spin, already halfway gone from him before the wheel even stops.

The couch is old and gives under a weight it doesn't recognize as its own — six-foot-one, wider through the shoulders than Adrián, a phone six inches from a face that is not asleep. Your thumb is already moving. It moves faster than his was, steadier, no hesitation in it, flicking past a video he'd stopped on, past a message he hadn't answered, and the blue light holds on features that have stopped blinking like a man who is still deciding what to look at.

Then the room comes in through everything at once — the couch cushion gone soft in the shape of someone's years of sitting, the phone case warm and a little sticky under your palm, the smell of cut grass ground into skin that no shower quite gets out anymore — and it isn't your history, it's his, arriving sideways through touch the way it always does.

The shirt first — long sleeves, worn thin at the elbow, and your arms remember pulling it on this morning before the sun was all the way up, remember why long sleeves in July: not the cold, the ink. A back piece, a name and a date in script across both shoulder blades, put there two years ago in a shop that smelled like green tea because the guy holding the gun didn't drink coffee either. *Sione*, it says, down one forearm where the sleeve's pushed to the elbow in the memory — his own first name inked into his own arm, and a date under it, 04/12/03, the day he was born, because his mother told him once that a man should carry his own beginning somewhere he can see it, and he'd laughed and gotten it done anyway, half as a joke, and it had stopped being a joke the first time somebody asked him what it meant.

The couch under you: this apartment, before this one, cheaper, and a girl who isn't anyone anymore, whose name isn't the one on his arm — that's a different feeling, older, filed somewhere with no ache left in it. Single suits him. He'd tried the other thing once and it hadn't taken.

The mole under your fingers when you touch your own cheek without meaning to — a thing people mention before they mention his eyes, and he'd stopped minding that around sixteen.

The earring, cartilage, cold metal at the top of the ear — his mother's brother had one and Sione had wanted one since he was nine and finally got it at nineteen and texted a photo to nobody in particular just to have sent it.

And under it all, the body doing what a landscaper's body does even at rest: shoulders that carry the memory of a push mower's drag, forearms that know the particular ache of a line trimmer at hour six, palms with a callus map from handle grips, quads that hold the last mile of a Wednesday like a debt not yet called. He is tired in the ordinary way, the good way, the way that comes from work finished and not from anything wrong. He'd showered. He'd eaten standing at the counter. He'd gotten into bed early because tomorrow starts at six and there's a yard on Colfax that needs the whole crew.

He is, you understand now, holding all of that lightly — a Buddhist ease about the tiredness, no grievance in it, just a body doing its job and a mind that mostly lets it. He clicks a pen he isn't holding right now; his thumb does something like it anyway, a phantom motion against the phone's edge, old habit look for a barrel that isn't there.

None of it is yours. All of it is, now.

You look at your hands — his hands — broad across the knuckle, grass-stained at the cuticle in a way no shower fully lifts, the phone still lit and forgotten in one of them. You turn the near one over slowly, like you're checking it's real, like it might not be.

"Okay," you say, to the empty room, to the window with Denver going dark blue behind it. "Okay. Let's see what you've got."

Nobody answers. Sione doesn't, because Sione isn't in there to. You lie back against the same cushion he'd been resting on a second and a lifetime ago, phone still warm in a stranger's hand that is, for now — for however long now turns out to be — the only hand you have.