Stephen Kvarnstrom

You are standing in Adrian Salcedo's kitchen in Honolulu, and the light is the grey blue of before anything has started. The beard is rough under your palm. You have been him for less than a minute, and the coffee he set going is still dripping. His knees are young. His shoulders are wide and tight in a way that feels like being well made. There is a white streak in the hair you keep catching in the dark of the window, and it looks like someone else's idea of a face.

He could do everything. That is the trouble. You stood at his counter and tried to want his life, the code and the quiet apartment and the tall morning, and nothing in you turned over. A body that works is not a reason. You were reaching for the next one before the coffee finished, and you know exactly why, though you would not say it to the window. The wheel loads. You pay. You let go of him the way you set down a cup.

Then you are crouched, and the floor is cold through the shoes.

A fluorescent tube hums overhead. The dryer's mouth is open and warm against your face, and one gray sock hangs from your right hand. Your knees are fifty-four years old. They tell you so at once, a dull grind in the left one. The air smells of detergent and hot lint and, faintly, damp concrete. Nothing travelled. You are simply here, mid-reach.

You pull the load out, still warm, and drop it into the basket. The sock goes with it, and your hands keep moving without being asked.

The sock's wool is the first key. A flash: Kate, his wife, holding up one gray sock with the heel gone, laughing, in a kitchen with a radiator ticking. Then the feeling arrives, a plain steady fondness that has worn smooth like a stair tread. It is not yours. It sits in your chest regardless.

The shirt against your back is the second. Gray cotton, soft from a hundred washes. He put it on this morning in the dark, one sleeve and then the other, while she slept. He took the jeans off the chair. He stood a moment at the dresser drawer with its eight crumpled shirts, and he felt the small private guilt of a man who folds nothing at home and everything at work. The memory is in his fingers. The ring turns when you flex them, thin and warm, and with it comes the church basement, folding chairs, a hymnal with a cracked spine, and Kate at twenty-nine in a borrowed coat.

Your thumb goes to your mouth. The nail is already bitten to nothing. A night shift comes up behind it: the dim room, the wall of screens, three hours staring at a login pattern that did not belong, and the cold clear pleasure of being the one who noticed. He is good at it. Three children come in a rush, a smell of cereal, a hallway of shoes. One of them is crying about a test. He loved them in a worried, helpless way, and it feels like carrying water.

There is something older underneath, folded small. A girl named Maren, a train platform, a letter he never answered. He thinks of her perhaps twice a year, with no wish to act. A pipe in a coat pocket upstairs, cherry tobacco, Sunday afternoons on the stoop in the sodium light. Your hands know the corner of a towel and how to square it. They fold fast, edges meeting, a precision he keeps for here and nowhere else.

You stop and hold your hand out under the tube's hum. The knuckles are chapped, the nails ragged, the band pale at the base. You turn it over once.

You lift your eyes to the dark square of the window and say, quietly, "Well. Hello, Stephen."

Somewhere behind the warmth of the towels, the wanting is asleep. You do not know for how long. It could be years. It could be before you finish the basket.