Sione Taufa

Dean Kowalczyk's knees are tired of the night. That is the first thing, and it is a small thing: fifty-one years in the joints, and I have been in them for under a minute. The call center headset is still around my neck. His wife's side of the hallway is dark, and there is a calm in this house I did not earn. I came to the wheel for no good reason a man could say aloud. He is fine. The scar through his eyebrow itches when I frown. Everything works, and that is exactly the trouble. I wanted something that did not work yet. I wanted to be handed a body and be a little afraid of it. Somewhere past the window of this Los Angeles dark, a freeway hums to nobody. I press the button.

Weight. The floor comes up under both feet, thick carpet through thin socks. I am standing at the foot of a bed with my hand flat on my chest, and under it there are ribs, and under the ribs a heart that has not yet noticed me. The room is blue with the early dark. A lamp burns low. Through the window, yellow light is coming in under a black stacking sky.

I am short. The ceiling is farther away than I am used to. My belly sits forward, soft and settled, and my shoulders are wide and heavy and strong. My hair is thinning at the temples, and my beard is crisp under my fingers.

The shirt is the first thing that speaks. The cotton is cool against my back, and my fingers find the placket. The buttons are wrong by one, the whole row jumped. The memory comes up through the cloth, and it is his, not mine. A Thursday morning, tired in a plain way. He had been awake since before the birds, praying with his forehead against the edge of this bed, the way his grandmother taught him. Then he stood and dressed in the dark so the lamp would not wake the house he lives in alone. The silence of that is in me now: a quiet he made on purpose, and a loneliness he never calls loneliness.

My thumb finds the tie. The silk is slick and cool, and it drags up a day: a glass office, the door always open because he decided years ago that a manager with a closed door is a man people stop telling things to. He knows everyone's kids' names. He keeps a bowl of mints on the desk, and the mints are where the cigarettes used to be. Fourteen days now. Something in my jaw aches for a smoke I never smoked. That wanting is his. It sits in the back of my throat like a stone and I take it for a moment, an honest guest.

I fix the buttons. My hands know how. Thick fingers, quick, with the patient calluses of someone who once worked with rope and fence wire and not a keyboard. They undo and redo the row without asking me. The tie goes round and over into a knot I have never tied, a wide, deliberate one, and his father's hands are in it. Eighteen years old, Tonga on a bad phone line, a man teaching him a knot for a funeral. I feel the pride and the grief braided together like the knot.

The carpet gives under my heels. His back remembers hay bales, a summer on a wheat harvest at sixteen, the dust, the cold water from a hose. A stranger's city boy's tenderness for the wheat country comes up in me, the stubble gone gold and cut, the huge sky. Somewhere in the bank is more money than he ever spends, quietly saved, never mentioned at church. I know it the way you know a coin in a pocket.

I look down at the hands. Brown, broad, dry at the knuckles. I turn them over. They are mine now and they are not, and I do not know how long that stays true.

I look up and say, soft, in a voice with gravel in it: "Okay. Let's see what you were going to do today."