Gerald Pankowski

The tow truck's cab still smells like diesel and the coffee gone cold in the cupholder, and that is where you are when the itch starts again — not boredom exactly, more like the feeling of a chair that fits wrong after you've sat in it too long. This body is fine. Scarred eyebrow, good shoulders, a job that pays the bills and lets you sleep at three a.m. after a call. But it's the 570th chair, and you've learned the itch doesn't go away by sitting still in it. It went away, every time, the same way. You thumb the bookmark on a phone that isn't yours yet, either — vessel.cards, the wheel spinning lazy little colors in the dark of a cab parked outside a closed auto shop — and you pay, and you spin, not for anything in particular, which is its own kind of admission.

The wheel lands and there is no in-between. One second you're feeling a scarred eyebrow itch from old habit, and the next you are on your side in the dark, sixty inches of mattress instead of a bench seat, a phone six inches from a face that isn't asking permission from anyone, thumb moving before you've caught up to whose thumb it is. The scroll speeds up. Not because you meant it to — because the body already knew how, and you're just the thing now steering the knowing.

The room is thick with sleep-smell, wife-shaped warmth two feet away exhaling slow, and the mattress under a hip that already aches in that low, familiar way before you've even asked it to move. The phone's glass is warm along one edge from the hour it's been held. That's the first thing that comes through, small and stupid: the phone, and how many nights this same wrist has propped itself in this same dead-tired diagonal, scrolling past nothing, because sleep stopped coming easy somewhere in his fifties and nobody talks about that part.

Then more, the way water comes under a door — not asked for, just arriving. The wedding band on the hand not holding the phone, warm from body heat, and under it a marriage: Carol, twenty-six years, her voice saying his name like a sentence it's tired of finishing, a fight about money years back that dissolved into her hand flat on his chest at two a.m., not sorry exactly, just there. A daughter, grown, gone to Portland, a voicemail he keeps and hasn't told anyone he keeps.

The shirt is off — this body sleeps bare-chested, and there's no shirt to touch, but the T-shirt folded on the chair by the window gives something anyway when your eye catches it in the sodium light through the blinds: the smell of flour that never fully washes out, worked into the weave. That opens the bakery whole — four a.m., every day but Sunday, the walk-in's cold slap on skin still hot from the ovens, forty years of dough under fingers that know weight before scales do. Big hands, doughy forearms with old burn scars gone silver, back that locks up getting out of bed some mornings so bad he has to laugh about it to Carol so she won't worry. Tremor starting in the last few years, small, in the fingers, worse when he's tired, and he's always tired now. He quit drinking eleven years ago on a Tuesday he doesn't romanticize. Church at nine, every week, the bishop's hand on his shoulder after his mother died, an anchor he doesn't examine much, just uses.

And under all of it, this specific stillness: it's the middle of the night here, dead quiet, a Saturday, and he should be asleep for the four a.m. alarm that never moves, but the ache in the hip won, like it does more nights than he'd admit to the doctor, and the phone was just something to do instead of lying there totaling up what hurts. The thumb keeps moving now, too smooth, too even, an old man's insomnia scroll gone suddenly certain.

You feel the weight of him settle into you last — six-four is more man than the cab ever gave you, a gut that's soft everywhere the tow truck body was hard, a shaved scalp cool against the pillow. The mole on the cheek itches faintly, the way a mole does when you think about it too hard.

The thumb stops. You bring the hand — his hand, gold band catching the phone's light — up in front of your face and turn it over once, watching the small tremor in it like it belongs to someone you're meeting for the first time, because it does.

"Carol," you say, quiet, not loud enough to wake her, testing the shape of a name that isn't yours yet either, already wondering how many mornings you'll get before the wheel starts feeling small again.