Colton Marsh

Yusuf's hands smell like cardboard and diesel, and the ache in his lower back is old news by now, a whole shift's worth of boxes stacked into it. You have been him since last night, and it has been a short, grinding minute — forty-some deliveries, a busted elevator on Crenshaw, a customer who wanted to talk about her divorce for ten minutes while you stood there holding her packages. He is muscular in a way that costs him, joints worn ahead of schedule, and standing here at the end of his route with the phone warm in his pocket you already know the truth of him: solid, tired, replaceable, exactly the kind of good you get bored of. The van is parked. The app says done for today. There is nothing left to want here. You open the site the way you always do, thumb already moving before the decision catches up to it. The wheel spins.

The car is still moving when you land in it, but only for the width of a held breath — his foot is already easing off, his hands already coming off ten and two and settling low on the wheel like a man about to argue with somebody. The blinker ticks for an exit that isn't his. Dash light lies along the backs of his fingers, green-gold, and under you the seat holds the shape of a body that has driven this road every working night for two years.

The steering wheel gives you the first of it: rubber worn smooth at exactly ten and two, a groove his thumbs have made without knowing it. Cold nights, warm nights, three years of the same commute out from a shop on Colfax to a bungalow with a chain-link gate that sticks. You feel, before you understand it, the specific relief of the drive home — the job done, the door locks fixed, the last customer's dead bolt finally turning sweet in its housing.

The key fob in the cupholder is next, and it opens a whole afternoon: a storefront on 6th, a lock cylinder pulled clean out into his palm, pins spilling like teeth into his cupped hand, and the particular pleasure of a mechanism giving up its secret to him and nobody else. He is good at this. His hands know it the way they know nothing else — steady, unhurried, more patient than the rest of him. He dropped out of a community college program that wasn't going anywhere and this was going somewhere, this paid, this had a van with his name stenciled small on the door.

The jacket sleeve against the wheel brings the tattoo up warm against his forearm — the crest, inked two years back in a strip-mall shop with a buddy who's since moved to Fort Collins, both of them a little drunk and a lot sentimental about a team that has never once rewarded the loyalty. The shirt under the jacket carries this morning: standing in front of the mirror in the room he rents, pulling it on one arm at a time, half-thinking about a text he didn't send. Her name comes with it, soft and recent — she left in March, and he still reaches for his phone some nights before he remembers there's nobody on the other end who wants to hear about a busted lock. He has not told anyone that he still checks.

The dip can in his jacket pocket, worn soft-cornered from riding there, gives up a hundred small evenings — parking lots, tailgates, the porch out front of the bungalow where the mountains sit blue and huge behind the rooflines and he sits with his boots up on the rail thinking about not much of anything. Church on Sundays when his mother's in town, which isn't often. A body that carries its weight a little heavy and a little soft, strong through the forearms and shoulders from years of prying and pulling, tired through the low back the way twenty-one shouldn't be yet. The scar through his eyebrow is nothing, a bike crash at fourteen, and it comes to you only as an itch, an old healed thing his fingers used to worry at before he stopped noticing it was there.

The exit ramp curves under the tires. Three miles from a door that sticks unless you lift the handle a half-inch first — his hands already know to do it, whenever they get there.

You look down. His hands are on the wheel low and wide, not where he left them, the tattoo catching the dash light, a stranger's steadiness sitting where an ex-girlfriend's absence used to be. You say it out loud, to the empty car, to whoever isn't listening:

"Not bad."

The blinker keeps ticking for the wrong exit, and you let it.