Terrence Oakley

Hector's knuckles are split from a P-trap that would not give, and I am standing at his sink in the gray before work, the water running, a woman's voice somewhere in the apartment asking if he wants eggs. Twenty minutes of being him and I know the way he turns a shutoff valve and nothing else. He is short and square and good at one thing, and today I find I do not want to be good at one thing. Somebody else's marriage is in this kitchen. Somebody else's mother calls at six. I turn off the tap. The wheel is already open in my head, the way a tongue finds a missing tooth.

Pay. Spin.

The wrench is in my right hand and my left arm is up over my head, and the ceiling is a car. Steel, a muffler, a bulb in a cage burning a hand's width from my face. The motion was in progress and I am in it, a quarter turn on a bolt that is not there. My hand has done something wrong. I feel it as a stumble in the arm, a half second off. So I do it again slowly and it comes out right. Then the next one, and I check that too. And the next, ten of them, each one looked at, as if this arm had never been trusted.

Air smells of cold concrete, rubber, gear oil. Through the open bay a sign across the lot says EMPLOYEE ENTRANCE, and the night behind it is black and dead quiet. Somewhere a compressor ticks.

The body is large. Hector was a door I had to turn sideways in, and this is a house. Muscle in the shoulders, a deep ache across the top of the back from reaching up, forty-one years pooled in the lower spine. The knees are fine. The wrench is warm from the hand.

My other palm goes up to the scalp without my asking. Fuzz at the sides, thick on top, a stiff dry feel to the bleached hair. The motion is his, not mine. Something opens.

A bathroom, a small daughter on the closed toilet lid with a box of lightener, her tongue between her teeth, and him saying *you're going to ruin my whole life* while she grins. The first time. Nobody at the shop said a word, and then everybody did. The pride of it comes up in my chest like heat, and it is not mine, and I take it anyway.

The rag in the back pocket. I pull it and the cloth is soft as skin, and there is a Sunday in it, a driveway, a boy handing him tools one at a time and naming each one wrong on purpose. Then a different year: his father's old shop towel, the same weave, the smell of a man long gone.

The shirt moves against my shoulders when I breathe. Sleeves rolled twice. Tonight he stood in a dark bedroom and buttoned it by feel so as not to wake her, bottom to top, and she said something into the pillow, *bring me back a coffee*, and he stood there a second longer than he needed to. The patch on the chest, his name stitched crooked. I do not look down at it. I am afraid it will make me him.

Boots, heavy, soles gone smooth at the outer edges. A slow sureness underfoot. Floor under them cold enough to feel through the leather.

The ring. I feel it before I see it, a thin band turning against the bone when I close my fist. It brings a kitchen, a long argument about money that ended with both of them laughing at the dog. Two kids and a wife asleep across town, and at this hour the only one up with him is me.

I set the wrench on the creeper. I lower my hand into the light and turn it over. Wide palm, black grease in every crease, nails cut short, gold on the fourth finger.

I look up, past the lamp, and say it quietly to whoever is there. "Okay. Okay, Terrence."

It could be tonight. It could be years. The wanting is not back yet, and I stand still, listening for it.