Glenn Pruitt

You are Efraín Zamudio for under a minute, and already it is wrong. The kitchen is quiet, a foreman's kitchen at the dead middle of a Kentucky night, and you stand at the sink with a glass of water you did not pour. His body is short and heavy and settled. The stubble itches. The freckles are only something you know about. His knees ache on the linoleum cold. A man in the next room is breathing, someone's, and none of it is yours, and none of it is why you came back. He did nothing wrong. He was only a man who could not reach the top shelf, and you spent the whole minute on your toes. You put the glass down and open the page with the wheel on it. You pay. You do not say the other reason, even here, where no one is awake to hear it.

The wheel turns. It has no sound.

Then the dark is a different dark, and there is blue light on one cheek and a phone six inches from your face. Your thumb is stopped mid-scroll. You are on your side in a bed that is not his kitchen and not anywhere you have stood. You start the thumb again, faster, steadier, past everything he had stopped on, and you let it go.

Now the room comes up through touch. The sheet under your forearm is cotton gone soft from a hundred washes, and the smell of it opens something: Sunday, a motel in Barstow, no, a church basement, folding chairs, coffee he did not drink, because he has not touched a drink in twenty years, and the long calm in him about that is a floor he stands on. The phone is warm. Its edge digs into the pad of your thumb and gives you a shipping app, a load board, a Thursday dispatch he will not be taking, and the dull pleasure of a man who is paid well enough not to look at the number.

The long-sleeved gray shirt clings at your ribs. It gives you the morning he put it on, but wait, it is the night one, the sleep shirt, worn thin at the cuffs, and under it the other morning, the flannel over a gray tee, red and blue, sleeve rolled twice, left cuff first because the tattoo sits there and he likes to see it. You look. An anchor, bold black, the color faded to rust and a green gone to smoke, got at nineteen in a shop off Mission with a buddy who is dead now. The memory is warm and heavy and has no words in it, only a hand on his shoulder.

Your jaw is working. There is a toothpick in your mouth, in bed, in the dark, and you did not put it there. His hands did. The wood is flat and soft where he has chewed it. Behind it comes the tin of dip on the dash, the wintergreen bite, the cold white light of the truck stop at first light, diesel and frying onions, his rig ticking as it cools. You are 6'1" and your back has the long ache of a man who has sat for thirty years, and your hips remember every mile. The pillow behind your head holds the shape of someone who sleeps alone, and the loneliness in it is not sad to him. It is just quiet, like a good engine idling.

You set the phone face down on the blanket. The screen light goes out of the room.

You lift your hand and look at it: big, ridged at the knuckle, sandy hair on the back, a scar of nothing, the tattoo running down the inside of the forearm. You turn it over. The palm is callused where the wheel sits. You close it, open it. Then you look up into the dark, and you say it out loud, low, in a voice with gravel in it that you are only learning:

"Well. Hello, Glenn."

The toothpick shifts. Down the street a garage door groans against the steep driveway. You wait to feel whether you want something else yet, and how soon.