Colin Presswood

The tremor starts before the wanting does. You notice it in Marcus Deshawn Fielder's hand around a glass of iced tea, on the back porch, fourteen hours in — a small fine shiver that isn't nerves, that's just how these fingers are built, and you sit there watching it and thinking about how tired you already are of this particular set of problems. Mid-level manager. A performance review Monday that isn't yours to have but is now, technically, yours to dread. Skinny fat, soft where you keep noticing it's soft, green eyes that water a little in the sun. Fourteen hours is not long, but it's long enough to know you don't want tomorrow morning in this kitchen, that phone, that inbox. It isn't hatred. It's just Saturday afternoon and there's a wheel that will give you anything else, and anything else has always been the whole point.

You go inside, sit at the same table, open the site on a phone that isn't yours to keep much longer, and spin.

The soap is already sliding down the door in a wide arc when you land, mid-stroke, your — his — thumb tucked against the sponge, wrist turning small tight circles on black paint gone iridescent with suds. The swirl stops. Water keeps running somewhere behind you, a hose hissing against concrete. Your knees are bent, weight low, bare feet cold on wet cement. There is sun on your neck, real heat, a whole different sky. The body under you is long where the last one was short, hard where it was soft — you feel the difference before you feel anything else, a kind of relief the muscle has and you don't yet.

Then the shirt.

It's not on you yet — folded over the porch railing behind you, a flannel, red and blue plaid, sleeves already rolled from this morning — but your bare arm brushes it reaching for the bucket and it comes anyway, a flash: him buttoning it three hours ago in a bedroom with the blinds still down, Danielle's voice from the bathroom asking if he wants eggs, him saying no, just coffee, thumb catching on the second button because his hand won't hold still first thing, hasn't held still first thing in two years, some doctor in Fort Worth with a name for it that Colin doesn't like saying. He rolled the sleeves to the elbow so soap wouldn't ruin the cuffs. He tucked his phone in the truck's cupholder, not his pocket, because pockets and a wet hose don't mix. All of it arrives sleeve by sleeve, exactly the way he did it, and you are wearing the memory the same moment you are wearing the shirt that isn't on you yet.

The sponge is what opens the rest. Foam-slick, gritty at one corner where it's worn thin — he bought a two-pack at the Kroger off Preston, this one and its twin still shrink-wrapped in the garage, because Danielle likes things doubled up, likes knowing there's a second one before the first is even gone. That's her all over, and here she comes: four years of her, the apartment before this house, the house itself with its new-build smell that never quite left, his pickup parked crooked behind her Accord that he's washing right now, his one Saturday ritual, the thing he does instead of church some weeks though he still goes most, tithes without being asked, prays in the cab of his rig somewhere outside Amarillo with the radio off because that's when it feels real. Trucking eleven years. Nights on 40, nights on 20, a mattress that knows his spine better than most people do. He likes the solitude of it and has never told anyone that, not even her — likes eight hundred miles of nothing needing anything from him.

The hose under your foot, coiled, warm rubber — a flash of every hose before this one, every driveway, a boyhood one in Waco where his father taught him to do this exact motion, wide arcs, never circles on the flat panels, circles put swirls in the clear coat, and it's his father's voice correcting him even now, decades later, thumb tucked the same wrong-right way out of habit more than obedience. His father is three years gone. He still washes the car like the old man is standing behind him with a beer, judging the arcs.

Your hands — his hands — ache faintly at the knuckle, the good ache of forty-hour weeks behind a wheel, and under the ache is the tremor, constant, small, has been there since before Danielle, something he doesn't mention to dispatch because a diagnosis on paper could end a CDL faster than the shaking itself ever could. He drinks two beers most nights to quiet it, never more, never smokes, never has, some churchgoing instinct that outlasted the actual churchgoing. Straight, steady, unremarkable in every way he's proud of and one way he isn't. No kids. No ex worth the word. Just Danielle inside right now, probably at the kitchen window, probably about to come out and tell him lunch is ready, and a black car going darker and cleaner under a Saturday sun he has washed cars under a hundred times without once being anyone but himself.

You look down. The sponge is still in your grip, suds crawling between fingers that are not shaking right now, for once, this one particular second, still with the strange stillness of somebody new behind them. You turn the hand over, study the calluses like a language you're only starting to read.

Then you look up, past the hood, toward the house, and say it to no one — to her, if she's listening from the window, to him, wherever what's left of him has gone —

"Almost done, babe."

Your voice comes out with his gap-toothed grin already loaded into it, easy, sunlit, borrowed. Somewhere back in Ohio a body is standing empty in a kitchen nobody will notice yet. You don't know how long Dallas gets to keep you. Nobody does.