Victor Hiroshi Nakamura

Richard Allen Tolliver's knees ache when you stand, and you are standing at the kitchen counter in Atlanta with the evening going orange in the window, the sales-rep shirt damp at the back, a phone in your fist. You have been him for less than a minute. It is already enough. He answers things before you have thought them. His belly sits against the counter edge like a second opinion. You wanted something quiet and the quiet turns out to be this: a man who has never once been hungry for anything but dinner. You thumb the page open. The wheel is already turning. You pay.

Light drops sideways. Warm wool-fabric under your thighs, a lamp-colored sun slanting in through a window gone gold, and in front of you a screen with one white number: 1. Controller in both hands, plastic warm from someone's grip. Then 0, and the soldier on the screen stands up in a ruined hallway, and your thumbs arrive a half-beat late, because they were not yet yours.

Your right leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. The heel drums the floorboards and the whole shotgun house hums with it, one narrow room after another, and you cannot make it stop, so you let it go.

You set the controller down, still lit, still buzzing faintly, and sit back. On the screen the soldier is shot and falls. You do not care.

The chair is rough under your palms, worn at the arm, and touching it opens something: a woman's voice saying *not that chair again*, laughing, and the feeling is fondness, the particular tired fondness of a man who has been told this for years and keeps the chair anyway. Her name comes with it, a girlfriend, her feet in his lap on a Sunday.

The flannel is soft with washing. You pull the cuff over your wrist and it hands you the morning: his fingers, not yours, doing the buttons in the dark at a quarter to five, the coverall hung on the hook by the door, orange gone brown at the knees, the left sleeve stiff. He dressed in the kitchen so as not to wake her. He drank coffee standing up. He put the earring back in last, the little silver hoop, thumb and finger finding the lobe blind, and you touch it now and feel the old small pride of a man who kept one thing from being twenty-five.

Jeans, heavy at the thigh, and in the right pocket a ring of keys. You close your hand around them and the truck arrives: the back step at six, steam lifting off wet pavement, the rail cold through the glove, the lurch when the driver pulls out, a hundred cans before the sun is fully up, and under it the pride of a job that pays better than anyone guesses, the savings, the house paid, the quiet money of a man who never spent it. Then a different flash, sharp: a woman in a kitchen far from here, the ex-wife, her back turned, a ring set down on a counter without a sound. It still lands in his chest like a stair that is not there.

Your eye drifts. You feel it, the left one wandering outward when you tire, and the room has a doubled edge. He has apologized for it his whole life. Your tongue finds the salt of an old habit, cigarettes, quit and still wanted at exactly this hour. Your back aches where the truck has been pounding it for years. Your arms are thin and strong as wire.

You lift your hands into the lamplight. Turn them over. Calluses at the base of each finger, a thumbnail ridged, a pale line where a glove ends. Not yours. Yours now.

You look up, past the dead screen, at nothing, at the room, at whoever is watching.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is a stranger's and rougher than you expected. "Okay. Let's see how long."

The leg keeps bouncing. Somewhere under the quiet you are already listening for the wanting to come back.