Sione Taufa

Lyle Cornett's knees have been telling you about the stairs all day. You stand in the water plant's break room with a paper cup of coffee gone cold, and the burn on his forearm itches the way it does when the weather turns. Sixty-three years in here. You have had him one minute, and already you know what he is: a man who checks gauges and says "yep" to the radio. Nothing in him is wrong, and nothing in him wants anything. You wanted something this afternoon, in the quiet after the shift whistle, and the wanting had nowhere to go in a belly like his. So you set the cup down. You think of the wheel and the click of it, and you let him go the way you'd let go of a rail.

Heat. A pan under your right hand, a spoon going round, and the circle stops, and you start it again the other way because your wrist wants to see what happens. Steam on your chin. Late sun on the back of your neck through a window you haven't looked at. You are tall now, taller than the man you were, and the floor is a long way down. Your shoulders are loose and strong. Something fried and savory is in the pan, rice and onion, and you reach for the salt and shake it in and you do not taste it.

Then the touching starts.

The spoon first. The wood is worn smooth at the neck, and it gives you a kitchen in Carson, a woman's hand over his on this same handle, a voice saying slower, slower, let it catch. His mother. He was nine and it was a Sunday. The feeling comes in warm and a little ashamed, because he stirred too fast and she laughed.

The shirt against your back, gray and washed thin. He pulled it off the chair this morning with the alarm still ringing, one arm and then the other, and stood a second in the dark with the cotton still cool. He was already tired. He is always tired in the first minute. Under that, a number he keeps in his head like a stone in a pocket, the debt, a long figure he does not say aloud, and his jaw tightening against it.

The jeans, stiff at the knee. The boots, brown, resoled once. The sole holds the dish pit: racks steaming up into his face, the hose in his glove, the scald that has stopped feeling like a scald. Twelve hours of it. He likes the end of a rack, when the plates come out clean and too hot to hold and for four seconds nothing is owed to anyone.

Your hand lifts to your mouth before you tell it to. The thumbnail is already between your teeth, bitten to the quick, and with it comes a rush of him at a bus stop, at a funeral, at a bank window, chewing the same edge raw.

The tattoo on the forearm throbs faintly in the heat, and with it, a name, Tui, an uncle, a boat, a long table under a tarp. He has not been home in six years. The memory goes through you like cold water and you let it.

Then you reach up and take down a second plate. You do not know why. His hands know. They set it beside the first, careful, rim to rim, the way he has done on every Friday since someone stopped coming. The reason is a grief too big to open, and you leave it shut.

You turn your hands over. Broad palms, calluses at the base of each finger, the nails gnawed. Pink skin where the water has softened it. They are warm and they do not shake.

You lift your eyes to the window, the dry palms in the courtyard, the light going gold on the stucco. You say, low, "Okay. Who's hungry?"

The pan hisses. The second plate sits empty. You wonder how long this one will hold, whether the wanting will find you here by dark, or tomorrow, or in the next minute.