Curtis Lanham

You are standing in a kitchen in Coastal Maine, in the dark, in Kenji Hayashida, and the refrigerator is humming the same note it has hummed for forty seconds, which is how long you have been him. His feet are cold on the tile. The beauty mark by his eye is a thing you can't feel and keep trying to. You came downstairs with the phone and a glass of water, and the water is on the counter untouched, because the wheel is already open on the screen, and your thumb already knows where to go.

He was fine. That is the insult of it. He had a wife upstairs, a calendar, a good coat. Nothing was wrong with him, and still, standing in his kitchen, you felt the walls of him, how small the rooms of a man are once you have the key. Someone should say that out loud. You pay. You spin.

Hands at ten and two. The dash glow is on your knuckles, green and low, and the road is black ahead and the cab hums through the seat into your spine. You are three miles from somewhere, and the car, a car, not the rig, drifts a foot toward the line. You pull it back in one smooth stroke, the way a body does when it has done it ten thousand times. Both hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider on their own. Your right hand finds the signal stalk and the exit is not his. It is yours. Tick, tick, tick, the little green arrow beating in the dark.

Then the jacket. Canvas, soft at the cuffs, a zipper that sticks halfway. The sleeve against your wrist brings a morning: his hands, big and slow, shrugging into it in a hallway that smells of coffee and dog, a girl's voice calling, Daddy, you forgot your lunch, and the small ache of being needed by three people at once. You feel it in his chest, not yours, a warm weight with a little dread in it, the arithmetic of bills.

The wheel under his palms is worn smooth and his thumbs know the seam. A memory comes up through it: a long haul, a night he pulled off at a rest stop and sat with a bottle in the cab, not drinking to feel good, drinking to be quiet. The shame of that is old and well-worn too. Under it, church on Sunday, the folding chairs, his girlfriend's hand in his, the pastor's voice, a faith he leans on like a rail. His knuckles want to crack. They do. Your fingers pop one by one against the wheel, and the relief is startling, a small private mercy.

His knees ache from the seat. His back is wide and hard, fifty-one years of lifting, and his scalp is cool where the cap sits over thinning hair. When you smile at nothing, the dimples dig in deep, and you feel them, two clean creases like thumbprints. The stubble scratches your palm when you rub your jaw.

You lift one hand off the wheel and turn it over in the green light. Calluses. Weather. Wide fingers that belong to children's backs and steering columns.

You look up into the dark glass and say, quietly, "Well. Hello, Curtis."

The signal keeps ticking. You don't know if you'll still be him at the next exit, or at breakfast, or only until the wanting comes back, and it always comes back.