Colby Renshaw

You are standing at Nasir Chaudhry's desk when it happens — his, not yours, though the word "his" has stopped meaning anything precise after a hundred and sixty-six of these. Monday, late morning, San Francisco light flat and gray through the blinds. You've had this body less than a minute and already you know you're going to leave it. That's the tell. You catch yourself looking down at the gap in his front teeth reflected in the black monitor screen and feeling nothing but a kind of restless itch, the sense of a costume that fits fine and satisfies nothing. Sixty-five years old, heavy through the middle, tired in the knees before you've even used them. Somewhere down the hall a woman says his name like she needs something from him, and the thought arrives, small and total: not this one. You open the laptop. The wheel is already loaded, like it knew.

The exit sign for a road that isn't his blinks amber against dark glass, and you are the one who put your hand on the signal.

You're gripping a steering wheel that isn't gripping back the way you expect — softer, thicker-knuckled, a wedding band clicking once against the plastic. The dash light is green-blue and low. Wheat stubble should be out there but there's no wheat stubble, there's only black highway and your own two headlights doing all the seeing there is to do. Your hands come off ten-and-two on their own, some old habit not yours, and resettle lower, wider, before you've told them to. The signal ticks. Green arrow blinking at a turn you have never taken and never will, because three miles up there's a driveway that belongs to somebody, and it isn't this one.

The shirt is what gives him to you first — cotton gone soft at the collar, sweat-stiff at the small of the back, the whole day's dirt worked into the weave of it. You feel, underneath your own arrival, the ghost-memory of pulling it on this morning: sleeve over the tattooed arm first, always first, because the ink still feels new even at four years old, the faces on his forearm — his husband's, rendered in black and gray, eyes closed like sleep — settling against his skin like they belonged there before he did. Buttoning up left-handed while the coffee maker clicked and hissed behind him, the ring cold against the plastic buttons. Cody was still in bed. Cody who used to be an ex before he was a husband, who took him back after Colby swore up and down he'd stopped seeing the ex who still, somehow, four years on, sends a text on his birthday that Colby doesn't answer but doesn't delete either. A whole marriage folded into a shirt.

The trowel is what gives you the site — not here, not now, but it comes anyway, riding in on the callus at the base of his palm: kneeling in a squared trench under a sun so full it flattens shadows to nothing, string lines taut, dust in his teeth, the particular satisfaction of a soil change revealing itself under the blade a half-inch at a time. He is good at this. Genuinely, quietly good, the kind of good that doesn't need saying, that he never says, even when his father back in Kansas asks what exactly it is he digs up out there and looks disappointed at the answer every single time.

The drift of his eye — you feel it before you understand it, a looseness at the edge of vision, the outward pull that means people sometimes aren't sure which of him to look at, and you feel the old flinch-armor he built around it in middle school, the joke he learned to make before anyone else could. Your own vision, wearing his, does the same soft double thing, and it should feel like a flaw and instead it feels like his, entirely his, something worn smooth by twenty-seven years of being looked at twice.

His weight settles into you — thicker through the middle than you're used to being anyone, a dad bod he complains about and Cody tells him, honestly, sleepily, that he loves. Tired legs. A back that will ache tomorrow from the trench regardless of who's driving it. Three miles from a house with a porch light already on, a husband already inside it, plates already out for two.

The wedding band is cold and then it is warm, because it is your hand now, and it has been on that finger long enough to have stopped being noticed until this exact moment.

You look down at your hands on the wheel — his hands, the ring, the tattoo disappearing up under a rolled cuff — and you turn one of them over slowly in the dashboard light like you're checking it for damage.

"Not yet," you say, to no one, to the empty seat beside you, and you thumb the signal off and ease back toward the center line, toward the porch light, toward a house you have never been inside and might, tonight, or might not, depending on when the wanting comes back around.