Danny Pruitt

Six minutes is not enough to know a man, and that is exactly the problem.

You are sitting in Sabir Oberoi's body in the middle of a Saturday, on the edge of a boxing ring in Atlanta that smells like bleach and old leather, and the heterochromia eyes you're wearing are pointed at a heavy bag that somebody else hung. Sabir's hands — good hands, a fighter's hands, quick — are wrapped and resting on his knees, and you have not thrown a single punch in them. You spun for a boxing trainer and got six minutes of sitting on a bench feeling his knees ache in a way that isn't yours to have earned. That's the whole problem with him: he is a body that knows things you don't, and every second you stay you are burning down the exact skill you paid for without ever touching it, like renting a piano and using it as a table. It isn't boredom, exactly. It's the specific insult of being handed a talent and finding out you can't even feel it work. So the itch starts, the low hum under the sternum that has nothing to do with Sabir and everything to do with the wheel, and you get up, and you walk to where his phone is, and thirty seconds later you are looking at the page again, the wheel turning slow and lazy under your thumb.

You spin.

The highway comes up around you like a room with the lights cut. Dash glow first, green-white, low across two hands that are not the hands you had a second ago — paler, a cross tattooed into the meat of one forearm, praying hands inked into the other, a wedding band catching the glow on the left. Ten and two. Three miles of dark road ahead and a body under you that sits lower and heavier than the last one, weight settled into a gut that wasn't there this morning in Atlanta, wasn't there ever, for you. The car drifts a foot toward the line on its own timing, not yours, and then straightens in one smooth pull that isn't a decision you made, it's a decision his hands already knew, muscle memory finishing a job you only just arrived to interrupt. Your hands — his hands — come off the wheel and resettle lower, wider, the way a tired man resets his grip on something he's held ten thousand nights. The turn signal clicks on. Left. For an exit that is not his.

It is the middle of the morning where he is, and this man is driving home on a highway lit like midnight, and that wrongness sits in you for a second before the shirt gives you the reason.

Because the shirt — plaid, soft through a hundred washes, the collar loose against a thick neck — remembers itself going on this morning, dark still outside, alarm at eleven at night that felt like nothing, felt like every night for six years since he took the graveyard runs because they paid the differential and because a quiet warehouse dock at 3 a.m. is easier on a head that doesn't want to think much. Danny Pruitt buttoning this shirt by the light of a phone so he wouldn't wake Renata, one sleeve at a time, right arm first out of habit, the cross catching under the cuff the way it always does, praying hands riding higher up near the elbow where they don't show under short sleeves at work but do here, off the clock, under flannel he wears loose. The tremor in his fingers doing the buttons — not nerves, blood sugar, the two a.m. low that comes if he skips the protein bar in the cupholder, comes anyway some nights no matter what he does, comes and makes his hands feel like somebody else's for a minute before it passes.

The wheel under his palms gives you the rest in a rush: fourteen years driving for the same regional carrier, the handheld scanner clipped to his hip in the daylight photograph of himself he'd never think to call a photograph, just Tuesday, just the brown uniform shirt and the shorts and the boots that have flattened to the exact shape of his feet. The disconnected haircut he's had since he was twenty-two because his barber died and he never found another one who understood what he wanted and stopped trying to explain it. The chew tucked into his cheek right now, small tin in the shorts he changed out of hours ago, a habit that replaced the drinking he did in his twenties and the drinking that ended his first marriage before the chew ever showed up to replace anything — Marisol's name arriving with a flat, old ache, not grief anymore, just weather. And Renata's name arriving warm, arriving with a version of tonight that hasn't happened yet where she's asleep with the porch light on for him, and their daughter's height chart penciled on the closet doorframe in a house three miles up this dark road, close enough now that his body — your body — already wants to lean toward it.

The seatbelt against your chest. His gut soft under the belt, thirty-six years and a diagnosis four years back that means the meter and the strips live in the glovebox now, that means the low he fights at 2 a.m. isn't only tiredness, that means his hands, when they're not doing anything, go to his own cuticles and pick at them raw, a habit his mother used to swat at when he was a boy in church, praying hands on his arm and picking hands at the ends of him, both true at once. His faith arriving the way it always does for him, not in words, just a hymn hum under everything, something learned before he could read.

You look down. The cross on your forearm. The band on your finger, thin gold, warm from his skin, not yours, his, still his in every way except that you're the one now feeling how it sits.

You lift your eyes to the windshield, to the dark exit ramp opening up on the left that isn't the one Danny takes, that his hands are already turning the wheel toward without him, without you deciding it either, just weight and momentum and a road that will have to be corrected in a second you're not thinking about yet.

"Wrong turn," you say, out loud, in his voice, low and a little rough with sleep he hasn't had, and you don't know yet if that's true.