I watched his eyes follow his hands. He raised the glass, caterpillar eyebrows pulled together, examining it to make sure the ice was at the right level. He placed it on the counter and then looked up, startling me out of my privacy. His gaze was an X-ray, making me squirm. I wished he’d look away first, but he didn’t, and when I couldn’t stand it anymore I cleared my throat and looked down. He resumed his work, pouring in the ginger beer from high up. The ice cubes cracked and melted, then settled into the fizzy pool of soda, and he poured in the rum, the thick dark liquid hovering at the top of the glass like a thundercloud.

I peered back up at him, head still down so I could look away quick. He was refocused on the drink, swirling it with a red plastic stirrer, then sliding a lime onto the rim. Perhaps he’d sensed my discomfort and was doing me a favor by diverting his attention. I lingered on the contours of his face, his cheekbones, the thin line of his mouth. Where did I know him from? Thick eyebrows, those eyes, beard like brambles. I wondered how it would feel against my palm. Whether I could shove my fingers so far inside it they would disappear. What could I search online—“man beard thick eyebrows”? I’d get images of half the men in Brooklyn. But then something flickered in my mind, like when you’re trying to call up where you’ve seen an actor and get a hint—a gesture or a line from a previous role: You can’t mean it, you can’t! He set my drink before me.

“You look like someone,” I said. I squeezed the lime into the drink, stirred it with the straw. My movements were languid; if I acted like I didn’t care, perhaps I could coax him into replying. But my hand was quivering.

“Seven,” he said. He had an accent, I noticed, sharp sounds slicing through air.

I placed the bills on the counter with an extra dollar for tip.

“Who do you look like?” I whispered, half to myself. I wanted him to wedge his fingers underneath my skull, into the folds of my brain. I wanted him to climb into my mind and see what I was seeing, what I was half remembering; to see what was inside, or underneath. Look at me again.

He didn’t respond, and I wasn’t sure if he’d even heard me. Instead he took the change and turned away, to slice lemons. His hand on the knife was better than Langham’s—just as large, but less meaty, more deft. He had choked up the handle of the knife, like you were supposed to, so his pointer finger and thumb pressed into the steel. A thin vein threaded along his pointer finger toward his square fingernail, his hand on the knife, slicing against the knuckles of his other hand. Those sturdy fingernails, those fingers. Sometimes, when I was sitting and reading, or just standing at the counter, my dad, feeling tender, would squeeze the back of my neck. It was always a surprise, his touch so unusual and unexpected I would sit frozen to make the contact last, to feel the heat of his hand on my skin—and maybe it was a surprise to him, too, because more often than not his grip would tighten until it hurt just a little bit, as if his own sweetness had caught him off guard—