Dean Farriday

You are Roy Whitewater for less than a minute, standing in the cab of a tow truck that smells like fryer grease and pine air freshener, and already you know you are not staying. The steering wheel under your palms is somebody else's calluses. There is a Cubs schedule magnet on the dash he never once looked at. Fifty-one minutes ago you were a farmer named Raymond Cusick, sixty years old, gray-headed, sitting at your own kitchen table with your own coffee going cold, and you left him mid-sip because the wheel doesn't care what you were doing. You remember Raymond's whole life the way you remember all of them now — in pieces, through his hands on his own things — his tractor's ignition, the porch rail he leaned on every dusk, and one name that kept surfacing no matter what he touched: Dean. Dean who came by Thursdays. Dean who spotted him at the gym twice a week even though Raymond didn't need it, just liked the company. Dean who called him "old man" and meant it kindly. You were Raymond for eight spins' worth of distance and it left a taste. You want to know what it looks like from the other side of that friendship — not the farmer being visited, but the man doing the visiting. That's the whole reason, and you don't say it out loud even to yourself, not really. You just reach for the wheel again, Roy Whitewater's borrowed thumb hovering over the screen, and you spin.

The bathroom light is too warm, three bulbs over a mirror gone spotty at the corners, and there is foam cooling on half a jaw that is not the jaw you had a second ago. Your hand — his hand — is already moving before you catch up to it, razor sliding up through lather at the throat, no hitch where a man usually hitches, and the second cheek clears faster than the first ever does. You feel the drag of it against real stubble, feel water gone lukewarm around your ankles from a shower he took ten minutes back, feel a body that is shorter and denser than the one you just stepped out of, weight sitting low and hard through the thighs like a man built for holding a plank all day. Blue eyes in the mirror. A dark mole riding high on the left cheek, foam sliding around it like water around a stone.

The razor is the first thing that gives you anything — cheap plastic disposable, the kind you buy six-packs of at the Marathon station, and through it comes a flash of him teaching a client the right way to hold a kettlebell, patient in a way that costs him something, because patience never came natural to Dean Farriday. Fifty-four years old and he still bites his nails when he's not paying attention, still catches himself doing it in client sessions and has to sit on his hands. The sink counter under your — his — palm gives you more: this exact bathroom, rented since the divorce papers came through eleven years back, wallpaper the landlord never changed, a house he never bothered making his because he never stopped expecting to leave it. No ex who still matters, and that's true, mostly, though the ring of pale tile where a second toothbrush cup used to sit says somebody mattered once.

The gray t-shirt balled on the toilet lid, waiting to go back on, gives you the morning whole: him pulling it over his head forty minutes ago half-asleep, shorts after, flip-flops he wore out to grab the mail and never took back off, the vape pen he thumbed on twice already before eight a.m. because mornings are hard on the lungs even when they're clean of everything else. He'll dress again after this — gray tee, gray shorts, the whistle on its cord for the noon client, a nineteen-year-old football kid who thinks Dean's too old to keep up and hasn't yet learned better. Through the tattoos on his forearm — fine lines, triangles inside triangles, done fifteen years ago in Cincinnati on a night he still half-remembers — comes Raymond. Not eight spins ago. Decades. High school, the two of them running the same mile in different times, Raymond slow and steady, Dean fast and mean about it, and somehow that turning into forty years of Thursday visits and gym sessions and sitting on that porch rail with beers twice a month, the big-night kind, counted careful because of what the doctor said about his blood pressure last spring. You feel it plainly now, what Raymond is to him — not romance, nothing like that, just the one person who has watched every version of Dean Farriday there has ever been and stayed for all of them. And you were just inside Raymond's skin fifty-one minutes ago, felt him think Dean's name over cold coffee, felt something in Raymond that might have been worry, might have been nothing, might have just been an old man wondering why his friend hadn't called back yet.

Your jaw is smooth on both sides now, faster than he's ever managed it, and the water in the basin has gone pink at the edges — not blood, just old foam and morning light doing something to the color.

You look down at his hands — thick-knuckled, nails bitten short, a tattoo peeking from under the rolled sleeve of the shirt he hasn't put on yet — and you turn one over slow, like you're checking it's real, like it might not hold your weight.

Then you look up into the mirror, into blue eyes that were never yours, and you say, to no one, in a voice that is going to have to learn to be Dean's, "Better call Ray."