Warren Nagata

You are Grant Osei for less than a minute, and already you know it's not going to take.

It's the hands. That's always the tell — you spun once and got a heavyweight boxer's body and spent the whole ride down feeling like you were wearing gloves made of concrete, and it was thrilling for about four minutes and then it wasn't. Grant's hands are slim and quick, good for stripping thorns off roses, and you stand there in the cold-storage room of the shop with a bundle of ranunculus dripping onto the floor and you think: this is delicate work and I am not a delicate person today. Twenty-four is supposed to feel like something. It feels like waiting. The kid — because that's what he is, a kid, whoever he was before you took the wheel from him — has hazel eyes that water in the cold room and a phone in his back pocket that keeps buzzing with a name you don't recognize and don't care to. There's nothing here. No ex worth thinking about, no history that snags. You did this one badly, forty-two spins in and you still sometimes grab a body like a rental car, and this one you're already sick of the way you get sick of a song. You want weight. You want years on someone. You want a face that has actually been rained on.

You go back to the site on his phone, thumb shaking a little from the cold, and you spin.

The fork is already coming back down to the counter before you've finished arriving, like the hand knew what it was doing a half-second before you did. It sets the fork down flat. Your shoulders — his shoulders, still his for one more heartbeat — shrug the coat off in one motion, sleeve dragging over a forearm, and you feel the low hum of a body that has been standing on its feet since five a.m., feel it the way you'd feel a hotel room that somebody just left. Warm chair legs scrape under you as you sit. There is a container of curry rice, half gone, and a fork, and you pick both back up without deciding to, and you eat, mouthful after even mouthful, looking at nothing but your own reflection ghosted in the dark kitchen window. Somewhere behind that reflection is a fridge covered in nothing, no photos, no magnets shaped like states. Bills fan out across the counter in the bad light.

The coat is what opens first. Canvas, worn soft at the cuffs, and it comes back to you not as a picture but as cold — a 5 a.m. cold, marine layer sitting low over the courtyard, dry palms clattering somewhile up above like paper. You've — he's — walked this walk four thousand times, from the stucco building to the bus stop to the shop, and the coat remembers all of it at once, a smear of identical mornings. Then one sharpens: a Tuesday, maybe eleven years back, when it was raining for once in this city and he stood under the awning of the café before it opened, before he owned any of it, and thought, not for the first time, that this was as good as it was going to get, and made peace with that so completely it barely hurt anymore.

The apron isn't on you now, but your hands know its weight anyway, know the two front pockets worn soft from a thousand pens and till receipts, know the exact angle you hold a steel jug at so the milk doesn't scald, so it whines instead of shrieks. Twenty-two years behind a counter smaller than most people's kitchens. You built it up from nothing with a man named Doug who is dead now, and a woman before that who isn't — Priya, who left when the girls were small enough to still want carrying, who calls on their birthdays and means it, mostly. Two daughters, grown, one in Sacramento and one who won't say where, and you love them the exact amount a man loves people he sees four times a year, which is completely and also not nearly enough, and both of those are true down to the floor of him.

The fork in your hand carries the last of it: dinner, alone, every night for longer than you want to count, because sitting down to eat feels like giving up on the day and standing up feels like still being in it. The shirt against your back — plaid, thin from washing — remembers this morning getting dressed in the dark so as not to wake anyone, except there was no one to wake, hasn't been in six years, and doing it anyway out of a habit kinder than loneliness. The tattoo on your forearm is decades old, done on a dare in a shop on Sawtelle, black tribal bands that mean nothing except that he was twenty-three once and wanted something permanent on a body that otherwise never asked for anything. Your feet ache in a specific, recognizable way — the fascia going after two decades of concrete floors — and your blood does something slow and heavy behind your eyes that you now know, distantly, has a name, a pill, a doctor twice a year who tells him the same thing about sugar that he nods at and doesn't quite hear.

You finish the container. Set the fork down inside it, tines up.

You look at your hands — his hands, freckled to the knuckle, the same span they've always been, small and quick despite everything — and you turn them once under the bad kitchen light like you're checking they're real, which they are, more real than anything you were wearing an hour ago.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the dark window, to nobody. "Okay, Warren."

Trying the name on. Not deciding anything else yet.