Darnell Overton

You are Grant Pruitt for eleven minutes more, maybe twelve, and Grant has a lanyard on. It's a Thursday morning in Houston, the air conditioning ticking over his desk, a stapler under his palm. He is fine. He works. He has a pale, tidy, forgettable life, and you sit in it with the site open on his second monitor, the wheel waiting. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He would have let you sit here until retirement, and something in you, a thing you won't name, has gone quiet in his chest and will not come back. So you pay. You spin. You watch the colors go by.

The seat is the first thing. Vinyl, cracked, warm along the backs of your thighs. The road comes up wet and black through the windshield, and the car has drifted a foot toward the line. You pull it straight in one smooth motion, and your hands come off the wheel, then settle lower and wider. Your thumb finds the signal stalk and clicks it down for an exit that isn't his. Tick, tick, tick. Dash glow lies on your knuckles. Cigarette smoke is in the upholstery, in the headliner, in the back of your throat.

Then the jacket. Canvas, soft at the cuffs, heavy across the shoulders, and the cuff against your wrist gives you a morning: a hook by a door, his arm going into the sleeve, the plaid shirt buttoned wrong and redone. He is tired in it, a long day behind a counter. Guitars on the wall, necks stacked like a crowd, a man at the glass with a wedding ring to sell and shame in his shoulders. Darnell gave him more than the ring was worth, and told him to come back for it.

The rings on your fingers are cool, and the silver turns when you turn your hand. One was given to him by a woman named Renée, years ago, on a stoop in the rain, and he kept it on after she stopped. You feel the old ache of it, that he still checks his phone for her and never says so.

Your knuckles want to crack. They do it, a bright pop that doesn't ask you, and the relief runs up the forearm. Your lungs are scorched and tight, a pack a day in them, and your back has the stiffness of forty-three years, a hum low in the spine. Your feet know the pedals. Three miles to the stoop, to the key, to a dark hall. Under the sleeve, the old ink pulls on the skin, faded color, bold line. Church comes up through the smell of the car: his grandmother's hymn, a folding fan, a hard pew.

Ahead the exit sign slides up green. Not his. Yours now.

You lift your right hand off the wheel and turn it over. The tattoo lies across the back of it, a faded thing with strong lines, and the freckled skin below the cuff is warm. You look up into the mirror, then past it.

"Well," you say, in a voice that's lower than any you've had. "Hello, Darnell."

The signal keeps ticking. You don't know how long you get him. Until the wanting returns, maybe. Tonight, maybe. You hold the wheel and wait to find out.