Gregory Vantine

Dean Farriday's kitchen smells like burnt coffee and the liniment you rubbed into his shoulder this morning, and you are standing in it holding a spin-class schedule like it's a subpoena. Small-town Ohio, Monday, gray light through a window over the sink. You have been him less than a minute and you already know the shape of the rest of the week: a strip mall studio, a fifty-eight-year-old woman named Carol asking if lunges are bad for her knees, a body that is strong and asks for nothing back. It is a good body. That is the trouble with it. Six hundred and fifty spins and you have learned that good bodies are the ones that make you restless fastest, because there's nothing left to solve in them. You set the schedule down on the counter. You are already reaching for your phone, and the site is already open in the other tab, the way it always is now, the wheel sitting there patient and stupid and lit up like a jukebox. You don't decide, exactly. You just find you are pressing spin, the way Dean's hand finds his own scalp when he's thinking about something else.

Three miles from home, on a wet road east of the city, a turn signal clicks on for an exit that belongs to nobody.

The wheel comes off first — both hands, all at once, off ten and two — and then you are the one resettling them, lower, wider, the way you like to hold a wheel and not the way he did. Dash light is green-blue on your knuckles. There's a wedding band cold against the plastic. Seatbelt cutting a line across a chest that is not as broad as Dean's, longer through the arms, softer through the middle in a way muscle memory keeps reaching for and not finding. The car drifts, corrects, drifts again as the signal ticks and ticks with no exit under it. Somewhere behind your eyes a man named Gregory Vantine is not screaming, is not anywhere at all, because there is nothing left of him to do the screaming.

The sweater comes first, wool against your forearms, and with it: a closet in a brownstone, a wife's voice down the stairwell — *you'll freeze, take the green one* — and the particular ease of pulling something soft on after eleven hours in a suit that fits like a verdict. The steering wheel under your palms gives you the callus at the base of each thumb, twenty years of commuting, and under that, deeper, the leather grip of a briefcase handle, courthouse steps in October light, a reporter's microphone he leaned away from once and regretted. The watch on your wrist is heavier than it looks and it gives you a birthday, a daughter's handwriting on a card, *Dad you're so old lol*, three kids' worth of noise at a dinner table that never fully quiets, a fourth chair sometimes pulled up for somebody's boyfriend nobody's decided about yet.

The wedding band gives you the most, because it always does. A church basement, twenty-two, folding chairs, a woman named Colleen who prayed out loud without embarrassment and made him want to be a man who could do that too and never quite managed it. Fifteen years of a bed that dips on her side more than his. An argument about a soccer schedule that was really about something else and got resolved, the way most of them did, without anyone saying the real thing. Good enough. Better than good enough, some nights, coming home late and finding the porch light left on for no other reason than her.

The jeans give you almost nothing — laundry, a Saturday, a hardware store — but the boots on your feet give you the drive itself, tonight's drive, layered flat and recent: a deposition that ran long, a partner's snide voicemail, the specific ache starting behind your left eye that means tonight is a migraine night, the kind where you'll sit in a dark room while Colleen brings you water and doesn't ask anything of you. Your body under all of it is forty-four and knows its own wear — a lower back that complains on long drives, hands too strong for paperwork and wasted on it, a scalp you keep running your palm over out of habit more than vanity, checking the retreat of your own hairline like a man checking a tide. There is a vape pen in the console door your hand knows exactly where to find without looking, and under the dash smell, old cigarette smoke nobody's mentioned in years, forgiven the way everything else in this car has been forgiven.

The signal is still ticking for a turn you were never going to take. You correct the wheel the rest of the way, easy, unhurried, and for one second both hands come fully off it, up into the dash glow, turned palm-up like you're checking them for something that isn't there.

"Hell exit is that," you say, low, to the windshield, to the three miles left, to nobody — and you put both hands back at ten and two, lower and wider than his, and drive the rest of the way home not knowing yet how long home is going to mean this.