Colin Vasquez

The kitchen faucet in Sanjay's house has dripped for eleven days, and you have not fixed it, though fixing dripping faucets is the entire reason anyone in this county calls his name. That's the thing that decides it, sitting at his cheap laminate table with his stubbled jaw in his freckled hand: forty-seven years old, a knee that clicks on the second stair, and a body that has started, in the last minute of owning it, to feel less like a rest and more like a stall. You spun this one out of curiosity eight days ago and have worn him since, wearing him the way you wear a coat you grabbed off the wrong hook — serviceable, itchy at the collar, not yours. The drip is loud tonight. The wanting comes back the way it always comes back, without asking permission, and your hand — his hand, the one you've had — is already reaching for the phone.

The site loads the way it always loads: patient, gray, a wheel and a price. You pay. You spin.

—

The wheel stops on dark and a dashboard glow and hands that are not the hands you just had.

You are gripping a steering wheel at ten and two, and the wheel is warmer than Sanjay's, thinner, wrapped in leather gone slick at the seams from use. Headlights print two cones on asphalt. There's a green dash-light wash across knuckles that are long and unweathered where Sanjay's were short and cracked, and you feel the whole architecture of a new body arrive at once — taller, so much taller, the seat suddenly too close, knees higher than they've been in over a week. The car drifts a foot toward the centerline on its own, some last motion of the man who isn't driving anymore, and you correct it in one smooth pull that isn't a decision so much as a reflex the hands already own. Both hands come off the wheel. They resettle lower, wider, finding a grip they like better. Your thumb — his thumb — finds the turn signal without you asking it to, and clicks it on for an exit that isn't his, because for one half-second neither of you knows yet which road this is.

—

The dashboard clock says it's evening, and outside the windshield El Paso is doing what it does at the end of a Thursday: the light going the color of a struck match over rooflines, dust hung low over the chain-link two streets from a turquoise house you have never seen and already, somehow, know is his.

The steering wheel gives you the first of it — not a memory so much as a decade, folded small. Learning to drive this same stretch of road at sixteen with his father not saying much, which was how his father said everything. Later, alone, this exact three-mile run home from downtown, so worn into him that his hands have driven it a thousand times without his eyes, which is maybe why the seat, the wheel, the smell of the upholstery all carry the specific ease of a man who has stopped noticing his own commute.

The gearshift under your palm gives you work — long hours at a standing desk between two monitors, code scrolling in green-on-black at 2 a.m., a coffee gone cold and skinned over at his elbow because he forgot it again, the particular satisfaction of a bug found at last, so small and so total that he'd laughed out loud alone in an empty room. He is good at this. He has never been anything but good at this, quiet good, unbragged-about good, the kind of good that pays for a house with a flat turquoise roof and lets $60,000 sit untouched in an account he doesn't check.

The denim jacket sleeve against your forearm gives you this morning — pulling it on over a plain shirt in a bedroom with blinds still drawn, the ritual so unremarkable it barely registers as memory at all: jacket, jeans, boots, the two seconds in the mirror where he touched the white streak at his hairline like he always did, not vain, just checking it was still there, still exactly the one unlikely thing about his face. He has had it since he was nineteen. Doctors shrugged. He stopped asking.

The pack of cigarettes in his jacket pocket, felt through denim, gives you the parking lot outside his office, five of them a day burned down to the filter while he stared at nothing, and under that a longer ache — a woman two years back who left less because of anything specific and more because he went quiet in a way that read as gone even when he was sitting right there. Nobody currently. He tells himself he doesn't mind.

His jaw works — chewing gum he doesn't remember putting in, some flavor gone flat and gray, jaw grinding on nothing the way it always does when his hands have nothing else to hold — and you feel how thin he is, how the shirt hangs a little loose at the shoulder, twenty-eight years old and skinny in the way of someone who forgets to eat when a problem is interesting enough. His beard is soft, recently trimmed, kept close and neat without vanity. There's a callus low on his right palm from this exact wheel, years of this exact grip, and nothing else — no scars, no ink, nothing announcing him but that white streak and the quiet.

The dash glow is still on his knuckles when the exit sign slides past — the wrong one, already behind you.

—

You let the car glide, drifting back toward the center of the lane like it knows the way even now, and you lift one hand off the wheel to look at it — his hand, narrow-fingered, green from the dash light, a stranger's hand for maybe four more seconds before it stops being that.

"Wrong exit," you say, to no one, in his voice, and it comes out steadier than you expected, and you almost laugh, and you don't yet know how long you'll be the one saying things in it.