Dale Pruneda

The apartment has been the same for an hour: the blue light, the half-empty glass of water going warm on the desk, the feeling of a Friday that already used itself up by nine. You have had this particular itch for years — not a hobby, not something you'd say out loud at a party, just a low current that runs under everything: what if you woke up as somebody else. Every version of that story, every thread, every bad movie at 3 a.m. where a man opens his eyes in the wrong face. You never thought it would be a thing you could buy. Then the site was just there, the way things are there now, vessel.cards, a wheel rendered in flat gray, a price that felt insultingly small for what it claimed. You tell yourself you're only looking. You pay anyway. You spin because the wanting has been patient for so long it doesn't even feel like a decision, just a debt finally called.

The wheel spins and lands and there is no falling, no tunnel, no sense of going anywhere at all — just a highway unspooling dark through a windshield that was never yours, hands at ten and two that were never yours either, dash lights pooling green on knuckles you didn't grow. Your hands — his hands — come off the wheel on their own, a small mutiny, and resettle lower, wider, more at ease than you are. A blinker ticks on for an exit that means nothing to you yet. The car drifts a foot and pulls itself straight, smooth as breathing. Somewhere behind you, three miles of road are no longer going to matter.

It is afternoon here, hard desert light slatting through the window, and that alone tells you something is wrong with the hour even before you have language for why: a Thursday, a shift that should have him sleeping right now, not driving. The watch on the dash clock doesn't match the gum going soft and forgotten against your back teeth, doesn't match the ache sitting low and familiar in a pair of shoulders that have clearly been doing this work for thirty years.

The shirt is what opens first. Cotton, warm from the body, a collar gone soft with washing — and touching it where it sits against your own shoulders gives you a flash: a bathroom mirror at five in the morning, fluorescent and ugly, an arm pulling a sleeve on while a toilet runs somewhere down the hall needing a new flapper he keeps meaning to fix. Dale Pruneda, the name arriving with the memory like it was stitched into the collar. Buttoning with thick fingers that already know the rhythm without looking. A clink of a wedding band against a button — Carla's face in the mirror behind him for half a second, toothbrush in her mouth, saying something about the Castillo job on Rainbow, and him saying back around his own gum, mm, got it, not really listening, the way you stop really listening after thirty-one years not because you love less but because you don't need the words anymore to know what's being said.

The wheel under your palms gives you more — calluses that have shaken a thousand startup cords, a strap of muscle across the forearm that knows the particular drag of a Toro against thick Bermuda grass, elbows that complain a little by two in the afternoon and have for a few years now, a lower back that has its own weather. You are sixty-four in this body and it tells you so without complaint, just as information: strong still, thick through the chest and shoulders, a goatee you can feel more than see, a hat somewhere behind you on the passenger seat with grass chaff ground into the brim. The jeans against your legs carry a flash of this morning too — no, not jeans, he'd have changed, and the shirt under your touch insists you're wrong about which day this is, gives you instead a whole stretch of afternoon: trailer hitched, mower ramps down, a sprinkler head he fixed for the Abernathy place without being asked because leaving it broken would have bothered him worse than fixing it for free.

The gum is a steady, animal comfort, working itself without permission, the way it has for decades — since he quit the cigarettes the year Teresa was born, thirty-some years back, and needed somewhere for his mouth to go. Teresa. The name comes with a whole wash of her: eleven years old on a bike in a driveway on Sahara, then suddenly grown, a phone call last month, her voice careful the way grown kids get careful with you. And under that, deeper, an older ache that isn't Carla's — Donna, a name gone soft at the edges with disuse, a summer forty years back he still visits sometimes without meaning to, nothing he'd ever tell anyone, a door he doesn't open so much as walk past and glance through.

The seatbelt against your chest, the steering wheel's worn leather, the particular give of this specific driver's seat shaped to this specific spine across a decade of commutes — each one hands you another sliver: a mass at St. Anthony's he hasn't missed in longer than he can say, hands folded, not especially devout but steady about it, a thing he does because his mother did it and because some weeks it's the only hour nobody needs anything from him. A number in his head he doesn't think about much, a net worth that crept up slow and surprised him, paid-off trucks and a paid-off house and a business that finally stopped being a gamble around year eight. Sober eleven years by his own flat choice, no story behind it he tells people, just a Tuesday he decided and a Tuesday he kept deciding.

Your — his — hands are still on the wheel, low and wide, easy, not knowing anything has happened, not knowing anything ever will. You feel the whole weight of him settle into you at once: sixty-four years of a body that works for a living, a wedding band warm from his skin, a mouth already moving on gum that has no flavor left. You lift one hand off the wheel at a red light that catches you three miles short of your own driveway, and you turn it over in the dash light like it's something you've been handed to carry and haven't agreed to yet.

You look up into the rearview mirror instead of through the windshield, and his own eyes find you there.

"Didn't feel a thing," you say, in his voice, low and a little rough with thirty years of outdoor air, and you don't know yet if that's relief or the saddest sentence you'll ever hear yourself say.

The light goes green behind you. Somewhere out past the wheel, past tonight, past however long this lasts, there's another spin waiting with your name — not his — still on it. Not yet, though. Not yet.