Denny Aubuchon

You are Ismael Cordero for the length of a held breath, standing in his kitchen at three in the morning with the tile cold under his short feet, and you already know you are leaving him. Not because anything is wrong with him — the nose the wheel gave him healed crooked and handsome both, the shoulders are good, the job pays and the doorman knows his name. It's that you spun into him less than a minute ago and felt nothing, no snap of unfamiliar weight, no ten seconds of a stranger's Tuesday flooding you — you got him and then, immediately, restlessness, because 934 men taught you that the first minute in a body is the only minute it's fully new, and you didn't want to spend it standing in a dark kitchen not being anyone yet. So the decision isn't even a decision. Your thumb is already on the phone. The wheel is already loading.

The road takes you instead — asphalt going soft-focus, dash light pooling where your hands were, and then they aren't your hands, they're wider, older, dusted with fine hair at the knuckle, and one wedding-pale band of skin on the ring finger catching what little light there is. The wheel doesn't fade you in. It just finishes turning the wheel — the other one, the real one, the plastic-and-leather one under your palms — a foot toward the centerline and pulls it back clean, like nothing happened, and the blinker starts ticking for an exit three miles short of where this body actually lives.

You are inside Denny Aubuchon, fifty-nine, and his flannel shirt is against your back before anything else arrives — worn soft at the elbows, a little tight now across a stomach that used to be flatter — and that's the first door. Through it: a Sunday, years back, buttoning this same shirt in front of a mirror in a house that still had someone else's toothbrush in the cup, Carol's, before Carol was an ex-wife instead of a wife, back when the thinning at his crown was just a rumor his barber mentioned and not a fact the bathroom light insisted on daily. Another flash, unbidden: his daughter at nine, laughing at how his hair used to catch static, You look like a dandelion, Daddy, and him letting her mess it up worse on purpose because the sound of that laugh was worth the vanity.

The steering wheel under his hands opens differently — calloused pads, a thumb worn smooth from habit, the small ridge where he grips it exactly the same every single night because sameness is what got him through the divorce, through the mortgage refinance, through eleven years answering headset calls in a cubicle that smells like carpet glue and other people's coffee. You get the whole shift in one pull: a woman on line four crying about a cancelled flight, Denny's voice gone flat and kind by instinct, I hear you, ma'am, let's see what we can do, while some part of him was already three miles down this exact highway, already smelling the wet street two blocks from his shotgun house, already thinking about the cigarette he'd have on the step before bed, pack a day, down from a pack and a half since the doctor's talk. The freckles across his nose itch faintly with old sun from a childhood spent on a dock somewhere green and slow-moving, Baton Rouge maybe, though the memory won't quite resolve, just warmth and river-smell and his mother's voice telling him to put a hat on.

His body is honest under you: the softness at the middle that comes from sitting nine hours a day, the ache low in the back that starts around four every afternoon and never fully leaves, but also the strength still in the forearms, in hands that know a wheel and a headset cord and how to coil it one-handed without looking. Fifty-nine and skinny-fat and tired in a way that isn't dramatic, just accumulated, like sediment. Freckles under fluorescent light his one memorable feature, the thing customers occasionally comment on when he video-calls into a rare training session — you have such nice — and then not finishing the sentence, embarrassed. Divorced eight years. One kid, grown, calls on Sundays, mostly. Church twice a month, more out of habit and the coffee hour than conviction. A drink at Christmas and a wedding, otherwise nothing, but the cigarette after cigarette after cigarette, the ritual of it, lighter in the shirt pocket right now, weight against the ribs like a second small heartbeat.

The turn signal is still ticking for the wrong exit when you surface all the way into him, both hands lower and wider on the wheel than his habit, and dash glow slides off knuckles that used to be someone else's. You lift them off the wheel entirely for a second — not safe, but you can't help it — and turn them over in the small green light, looking at the band-pale line where a ring isn't anymore, at freckles going up the back of each one like a scatter of something thrown and stuck.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the windshield, in a voice pitched lower than the one you had thirty seconds ago — and you don't know yet if that's Denny's relief leaking through or only yours.