Gary Ostrowski

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The griddle is still hissing behind you when you check the site on your phone, thumb smudging grease on the screen, and that is the whole reason: you are twenty-five years old in a body that smells permanently of fry oil, standing in a walk-in freezer on your break because it's the only quiet place in the building, and you are so tired of this particular tired that you would spin for anything else. Ethan Kowalczyk has a bad knee and a manager who hates him and eleven more hours on his feet before the body is his own again tonight. You have been him less than a minute of your own attention — the rest was just living it, which is worse. You open the app, thumb the wheel, and it spins the way it always does, too fast to watch, and you are already gone before it stops.

The highway comes up under you like a held breath let go. Both hands at ten and two, a stranger's heavy forearms, dash light green on the knuckles — and then the hands are not doing what they were told. They drift the car a foot toward the centerline and pull it back in one motion too smooth to be a correction, and settle low on the wheel, wide, like they've just remembered they can rest. The turn signal clicks on, blinking for an exit that means nothing to you and everything to the man whose foot is already easing off the gas. Three miles from a home you have never seen, in a heat that presses through the windshield even with the sun going down, you are sitting in Gary Ostrowski's body doing sixty on 610 with no idea, yet, that it's yours.

The shirt gets there first. Denim, worn soft at the elbows, and the memory comes in with the fabric against your back: a closet in a house with a pool nobody swims in anymore, a wife who used to pick these shirts out for him and doesn't anymore, and the particular vanity of a fifty-year-old man who still thinks a barrel chest looks better in denim than in anything a stylist would put him in. This morning — his morning, hours behind you now by the clock but instant in the arriving — he stood in front of that closet in his boxers with the vape in one hand, took two pulls of watermelon-flavored nothing, and put this shirt on sleeve first, right arm, the way he's put on every shirt since Little League, because a coach told him to and it stuck for forty years. The wedding ring finger remembers its ring before you do — a pale stripe of skin under your palm as you register the wheel, and with it, unbidden, four years gone: Diane's voice on a phone call already tired of being on it, the two of them deciding out loud, evenly, like professionals, that the house should go on the market too. No kids to fight over. Just the house, and the ring finger, and eleven years of Sunday mass together ending with her taking the pew four feet farther down at the same church, and him letting her, because it was hers to take.

The lockbox is not in your hand now but you remember its weight from an hour ago on a porch in Meadowbrook, the little combination wheels sticky in the heat, the smell of somebody's gardenia hedge dying in a drought, a buyer's wife saying she loved the crown molding while her husband checked his phone behind her back. Thirty years of that. Thirty years of porches and gardenias and molding, of being the friendliest man in any room he walks into and going home alone to a house too big for one plate at the table, and somewhere in there — steady, unglamorous, real — three million dollars and change that nobody who meets him on a porch would guess at, because he still buys his loafers on sale.

Your leg is bouncing. It's been bouncing since before you noticed, heel drumming the floor mat, an old motor that runs whether or not he's thinking about it, running now under a body that isn't panicking, just idling. Under the shirt, under the gut he apologizes for at every physical, his heart does the thing his doctor has a name for and he has a joke for, and the joke isn't funny tonight in a way that has nothing to do with jokes. Fifty is heavier than twenty-five. It sits differently in a seat. It knows things about its own wear that twenty-five doesn't ask about.

You look at your hands on the wheel — his hands, wide, a little swollen at the knuckle, the scar through the eyebrow itching for no reason your face understands — and you flex them once, testing the size of them, the ring-tan catching the last of the dash light.

"Well," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice forty years deeper than the one you left in a Denver freezer, "guess I missed my turn."