Garrett Nishimura

Garrett Nishimura is a bus driver, and he lives in Las Vegas.

You are standing in Calvin's kitchen in Denver, and the lazy eye has been wrong in every mirror for three minutes. The left one drifts. You keep correcting for it, turning your whole head to look at things straight, and you realize you will be doing that for as long as you wear him. Calvin's uniform smells of floor wax and other men's cigarettes. His knees ache from stairs he hasn't climbed yet. The wheel gave him to you, and you are already tired of tilting your head. You had wanted something that could stand a door all night without wondering about it. You didn't want a man who watches himself watch. So the page is open, the card is in your hand, and your thumb is down.

The wheel turns, and you are lying on your side in the dark.

The phone is six inches from your face and the blue of it is on one cheek. Your thumb is stopped mid-scroll. The lamp on the nightstand is low, and the sheets are black and cool and a little rumpled. Your thumb starts again, steadier than his, flicking past whatever he had stopped on. Something is dull in the back of the jaw. It is the ache of a man who works nights and has not yet slept.

The shirt is soft, thin cotton against your shoulders, a black tee washed a hundred times. It gives you a flash that isn't yours. It is a morning, and a hand takes it off a hook in a dim room. A wife's shape is asleep under the blanket, and a small child's sock lies on the carpet. He steps over it without a sound, and the love in it is plain and unspoken. The drawstring pants are under your fingers, and they give you an evening: a kitchen, rice steam, a toddler's laugh bouncing off a cabinet. He is leaning on the counter with his leg bouncing, the way it always does, and his wife says "sit" and he doesn't.

You feel the leg now, bouncing under the sheet without being asked. It is a restless, loyal leg. The band on your left hand is cool metal, and it opens a door: a parking lot, a ring box, a girl he nearly lost because he was too proud to say so. Then the old girlfriend flickers through, a laugh in a car with the windows down, brief and hurtful, and gone. The muscle in your arms is dense and easy. You know how to hold a wheel with these hands, how to feel a long bus lean into a turn, how to wait out a red light at the end of the line. Your ears carry two small studs. Your jaw is smooth. The bed smells of detergent and warm skin.

You lift your hand off the phone and turn it over in the blue light. The ring catches. It is a stranger's hand, and it is warm.

You look up, past the glow, and say quietly, "Hello, Garrett."

The leg keeps bouncing, and you wonder how long it will be yours.