Gerald Muskie

Colton Braswell's knees are bad at thirty-five, which is the first thing you notice standing in his kitchen at eleven in the morning with nothing to do. Three minutes in him last time, some job site, some ladder — and now he's just a body between spins, coffee going cold, mid-desert light flat and white through the blinds. You did the math on him already: contractor, decent shoulders, boring. He was supposed to feel like winning something. Instead you're standing in his kitchen listening to his fridge cycle on and thinking about how his knees ache going down stairs, how that wasn't in the description, how you paid for athletic and got a warranty claim. That's reason enough. You go back to the site because the wheel doesn't ask why, and neither do you, really — you just know that a body stops being interesting within the hour and you have never once made yourself wait past that.

You spin.

The wheel gives you Gerald mid-turn, his own hands already leaving the wheel of a car that isn't drifting anymore, and you are in him at the exact second his blinker starts ticking for an exit three miles wrong. His body takes you like a coat that's already warm: shorter than you left, five-six and solid through the middle, a low hum of ache sitting in the lower back like it has been there for years and intends to stay for the rest of them. Streetlights strobe orange-dark-orange over the dash. His hands come down off ten-and-two and rest lower on the wheel, wider, and you feel how tired those hands are before you feel anything else about him — a tiredness with texture, with calluses, a thumb that doesn't bend all the way.

The steering wheel is the first thing that talks to you. Cold vinyl gone soft at the rim from twenty years of the same grip, and it gives you an afternoon: him circling this same block after a job ran long, Eagles game on low, calling Denise to say he'd be late again, her voice not even annoyed anymore, just tired in the same key as his back. The wedding band clicks once against the wheel and that alone unlocks the wedding — a union hall in the Northeast, folding chairs, his mother crying because he'd finally, finally settled, and Denise in a dress the color of a robin's egg that she still has in a garment bag she won't throw out.

The flannel shirt on your torso is next, the one from the portrait but softer now, worn-in — and dressing comes back whole, this morning, sleeve by sleeve: him standing in the bedroom doorway so the light from the hall wouldn't wake her, working the buttons with fingers stiff until the second cup of coffee, favoring the left shoulder because sleeping wrong on it again. He'd looked at himself in the dresser mirror a half-second longer than he needed to, at the mole high on his cheek that Denise used to trace with one finger before either of them had any gray at all, and thought nothing in particular, the way you don't when a face has been yours for forty-nine years.

The dash glow gives you the drive out this morning, the walk-in cooler at Alvarez's Meats fogging white around him while he swapped a compressor with hands that have done this ten thousand times and don't need him to think about it anymore — the copper tube bender heavy and exact, the small mean satisfaction of a job that hums back to life clean. He is good at this. Nobody tells him so. He doesn't need them to.

Somewhere further down, touched off by nothing you can name — maybe just the ring, maybe just being alone in the dark — there's an ex-girlfriend's name sitting in him like a stone worn smooth, Carol, a version of his life he didn't take, no weight to it now except the specific gravity of every road not driven. And beneath that, warmest of all, a kid — his kid — a voice on the phone an hour ago saying *drive safe, Dad*, easy as breathing, and something in his chest going soft and helpless at it every single time, still, after all these years of hearing it.

The car is drifting a foot before it isn't. You correct it without deciding to, his hands already knowing the wheel better than you do, and the blinker ticks on for the exit that isn't his, and you let it run one more click before you reach over and switch it off, because whatever else is true, you are not going to put this body in the wrong driveway on your first minute wearing it.

You look down at your left hand on the wheel — thick fingers, a plain gold band, a mole's faint shadow crossing your vision at the edge of your cheek when you glance at the mirror — and you turn the hand over slow, like it might not hold together, watching the streetlight slide off the wedding band.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the dash, to whatever was riding shotgun in this man for forty-nine years and isn't anymore, and three miles from a house with a porch light already on for him, you take the exit that is his.