Arthur Jensen

The screen has been the same shape for years: a browser tab open too long, the blue light of a Wednesday that has nothing in it. You have read the threads at two in the morning more times than you'd admit to anyone, the ones about waking up in someone else's life, and you always closed the laptop the same way, a little ashamed, a little hungry. Tonight there's a site instead of a thread. A wheel on a plain page. You pay before you can talk yourself out of it, and you spin, and there isn't a countdown or a warning, just the wheel slowing down and then a name arriving that isn't asked of you at all.

The water is already running when you get there — not into a room, not into a hallway, straight into a driveway, into a body standing in it. Your palm — his palm — is wrapped around a sponge gone heavy with suds, and the arm attached to it is thicker through the forearm than you expected to feel, sun-marked, a plain ring pressed into the base of one finger. Soap slides down a car door in a wide arc ahead of you, and the motion doesn't stop when you arrive, it just changes: your thumb tucks under the sponge without you telling it to, the wrist turns in small tight circles, and behind you, for the first time all morning, the swirl marks stop showing up in the paint. Something in the hand already knew how to do this. You didn't.

It's the shirt that gives you the first of it — not thought, just weather, a cotton collar damp at the neck and a memory of pulling it over his head forty minutes ago, still fogged with sleep, the ceiling fan turning too slow to matter. Sleep apnea; the mask on the nightstand, the hiss of it shutting off when he sat up. Night work does that to a man: makes eleven in the morning feel like the middle of his night, makes the sun through the blinds an insult. He's been driving a flatbed since he was twenty-six, and the calluses along his palm know the weight of tow chains before his mind ever gets there — the hook cold in his hand at 3 a.m. on the 405, hazards ticking, some stranger's wrecked sedan waiting to be dragged onto the bed. Jensen's Towing on a patch over his heart, his own first name stitched under it like the company needed reminding he was a person and not just a rate per mile.

The shorts against his thighs bring back this morning exactly — stepping into them still not fully awake, the elastic loose at the waist the way it's been getting loose the last couple years, a soft gut he's stopped fighting and started calling a dad bod because his wife laughs when he says it like that. Her. Standing in the bathroom doorway an hour ago telling him don't forget the car, my mother's coming Sunday, and him grunting yes at her over the sound of the electric razor doing nothing to the unibrow that's been the one thing people notice about him since junior high. Two kids down the hall still asleep, a boy and a girl, and love for them arrives not as a scene but as a whole climate, something he doesn't examine, just stands inside.

There's an ex in there too, touched off by nothing you can name — just a flicker, a name that used to mean everything and now means a Wednesday feeling that passes through him like weather and is gone, the specific ache of a person who got away clean and stayed gone. He doesn't drink, hasn't in years, doesn't smoke, never did; Mass on Sundays when the shift allows it, a rosary in the truck's cupholder he touches more out of habit than belief some weeks. Twenty-five, thirty thousand put away, maybe more, never enough to feel it, always enough to sleep — when he does sleep, which the machine on the nightstand makes possible and which the night shift makes a joke.

The hose keeps running against the concrete, indifferent, and his sneakers are wet through at the toe, and his shoulders carry the particular tiredness of a man who works when the world sleeps and is awake now only because the car had to get done before the heat came up. All of it sits in this dad-bod frame, five foot six, solid through the middle, a body that has hauled chain and slept badly and gone to church anyway.

You lift the sponge-hand and look at it, suds sliding off between the fingers, the wedding band catching gray morning light, and it takes you a second to understand that you are looking at it like it's not yours, because it isn't, not really, not yet.

"Whose hands are these," you say, out loud, to the empty driveway, and nobody answers, and the water keeps running over the shoes that aren't yours either.