Kenneth Baik

The wheel loads slow, like it's thinking about it. You've had the tab open for an hour, closed it twice, opened it again. Nothing on tonight. Nothing on any night lately, if you're honest, which is its own kind of reason. You've wanted this since you were young enough that wanting it felt like a secret — not to be someone else exactly, but to know, once, what the seam feels like where you stop and another person starts. Every story about it was a rumor. This is a receipt page and a spinning wheel and a button that says SPIN, and you have a card ready, and it feels stupid and it feels like the only honest thing you've done all week. You pay. You press it. The wheel goes around and around and there is a sound like a slot machine that has never paid anyone out, and then it stops on a face you don't know, a name tag that says KEN, and the screen just says: **taken.**

You are mid-stride, and the stride does not break.

His weight comes into you like a dropped anchor — thick through the shoulders, heavier in the gut than you expected, a man built for lifting things that don't want to be lifted. Cold wet air on a throat that tastes like well whiskey gone stale. A jacket hangs open over you, unzipped, flapping a little at the hem. One shoe had been catching the pavement every third step — you feel that ghost of a stumble arrive and then simply not happen, like a hiccup that decides against itself. You catch balance on the hood of a parked car without meaning to, palm flat on cold wet metal, and then you're walking, even, quiet, forty clean steps you didn't ask for, his legs doing it out of muscle memory while you're still arriving into the rest of him.

The jacket is the first thing that speaks. Canvas, salt-stiff at the cuffs, and it gives you a flash — him shrugging into it in a garage doorway at the end of a shift, rag stuffed in the back pocket of his pants, some radio playing Spanish rock that Ruiz always had on. Under it, a chest with a tattoo you can feel more than see, cross and praying hands inked into skin over a heart that isn't beating any faster than it should, which surprises you — you expected the body to panic. It doesn't. It's not built for panic. It's built for hangovers, and it has one starting already behind the eyes, a low tide of ache that says tomorrow, but not tonight yet.

The ring on the left hand is cold, plain, and it opens the widest door of all. A courthouse in June, ten years back — no, more, she's had her own place in his head for a long time now, a woman with paint on her jeans and a laugh he married for. Her name comes half-formed, Priya or Preeya, gone again before you can hold it, but the feeling stays: a marriage that is fine, mostly, that has weathered a first wife's ghost still living in a drawer of old photos he won't throw out and won't look at either. The ex-wife's name arrives with a different flavor entirely — sharper, an old scar that still knows how to ache in wet weather. Two marriages, no kids in either, a want that got quietly buried somewhere in his thirties and never dug back up.

His hands come alive against your palms — thick, scarred at two knuckles, a burn scar on the left thumb pad old enough to be smooth. They know things without being told: the particular give of a lug nut before it's actually loose, the weight-shift of pulling a transmission pan without dropping the fluid on your own boots. Under the raised car this morning — no, yesterday morning, the shift that ended hours before this walk started — the smell of the bay comes back through the jacket's collar, motor oil and hot rubber and the little tin of dip he keeps in his front pocket, which your tongue can still half-taste, gone stale and bitter at the back of his throat under the whiskey.

Dressing comes back too, unbidden, the shirt against your back giving it up in pieces: this morning, buttoning up the navy work shirt one-handed while the other hand held his phone to his ear, a bank call, a mortgage on a lake house he's still not sure he needed, the particular satisfaction of a name tag that says KEN because he never corrected the embroidery guy who typed it wrong twenty years ago and it stuck. He is worth more money than the shirt would ever suggest — some, luck, mostly a garage that turned into three garages that turned into a very good accountant — and none of it is on him tonight, all of it just cash and static behind eyes that are red from bourbon and short sleep, a body that snores loud enough his wife sleeps in the other room some nights and neither of them says why out loud.

Two in the morning, and somewhere very far from where you started it is still deep dark too, the same breath of night stretched thin over two clocks. He'd walked the long way because a mechanic who drinks like this does not want to walk into his own kitchen too fast, does not want the light on when he opens the door. You feel that reluctance still sitting in the muscles even as you turn left at the corner — which is not his way home, which is nobody's way home, which is only yours, now, walking a body that has stopped scuffing its shoe because whatever was stumbling in it a moment ago has quietly, completely, stopped being him.

You stop under a streetlamp and lift both hands into the orange light and turn them over, his hands, thick-knuckled, oil ground into the whorls of two fingerprints that no amount of soap ever gets fully clean.

"Ken," you say out loud, trying the name in his voice, tasting how it doesn't fit right in your mouth yet. "Ken Baik."

You don't know for how long. Nobody does. You just know the wheel is still sitting open in some tab in some room you no longer have, waiting for the next time the wanting comes back around.