Kenneth Odom

The apartment is the same temperature it always is, which is to say you never notice it, and the laptop is warm on your legs the way it gets after too long open, and outside your window it is early evening and nothing is happening and nothing has happened all day. You have had this particular hunger since you were young enough that you don't remember starting it — the wanting to be someone else, anyone else, to stand behind a stranger's eyes for even a minute — and you have fed it on other people's stories for so long that you stopped expecting to feed it any other way. Then a link, then a page, then a wheel that looks cheap and stupid and is not. You pay what it asks. You do not fully believe it will do anything. You spin.

Ken is thirty-one years into knowing this dashboard the way you know a face, and his hand is on the wheel doing the thing it does at the end of every route — small correction, small correction, the bus leaning into the turn onto Main by the dead diner with its unlit sign — when the motion goes wrong. Not wrong like a swerve. Wrong like a hand that forgot, for a quarter second, what it was doing. Then it does the turn again, slow, careful, correct, like a student. Then the next ten motions come out checked — mirror, mirror, gauge, mirror — on a route that has not asked to be checked in years.

You are behind his eyes and the weight of him is enormous and unfamiliar, a gut you didn't have a second ago, shoulders that carry differently than any shoulders you have ever had, because you have never had any. The overhead lights of the bus are on because outside is going gray-blue, and there are no passengers, and the diner slides past the window with its red letters half-lit by nothing, dead a long time. Your hand — his hand — is on the wheel, and there's a wedding band pressing cool against your finger, and against your back the shirt is damp through with a day's driving.

It comes in through the shirt first. Sleeve by sleeve, this morning, a body heavier and slower getting up than it used to be, the top button that doesn't sit right anymore over the belly and hasn't for years, Renee's voice from the kitchen telling him route six is running a substitute driver again and he better call in early if he wants his usual bay. The name patch under your palm when you press it flat without meaning to — KEN — and with it the whole weight of thirty-one years of people calling him that on this exact route, at this exact stoplight, past this exact dead diner that used to serve the best chicken and dumplings in three counties before it folded and nobody in town could say exactly when.

The toothpick. You didn't notice it until your tongue finds it, worn soft at one end, back molar, been there since the second stop of the shift, a habit that outlived the cigarettes he quit before the youngest was born and the beer he just sort of stopped wanting somewhere in his forties without ever calling it a decision. Chewing it comes back a whole personality: patient, close-mouthed, a man who lets the wheel do the answering when somebody's rude to him at the fare box.

The band on your left hand is the loudest thing in the cab. It brings Denise before it brings anything else — twenty-six years, her hand flat on his chest at five in the morning telling him his pressure medicine's on the counter, don't forget, and him not forgetting, mostly. It brings the two kids, one grown and gone to Columbus, one still cussing about her curfew. It brings, underneath that, quieter, an old ex from before Denise, a name that still surfaces on slow nights on this same road for no reason he's ever satisfied, gone twenty years and still somehow parked in a corner of him he doesn't clean out.

The bus's grip in your palms brings ten thousand identical days, brings his father, who drove trucks and told him a man's word is his brakes — check them even when you know them — brings the pressure in his own skull some mornings, a dull warning behind the eyes he takes his little white pill against and mostly ignores, brings the Wednesday-night pew and the choir he can't sing worth anything but stands for anyway. It is a lot of a life arriving through a shirt collar and a name patch and a ring, and none of it is being handed to you kindly — it comes in his feeling, heavy in the chest, glad and tired and a little sore in the lower back the way fifty is.

You bring the bus to the curb at the end of the line, gently, correctly, the way his hands already know without asking you, and you sit there with the engine idling under you and lift both hands off the wheel and look at them in the dash light — the freckles scattered dark across the backs of them, the band on the left, the toothpick going still between your teeth.

You look up, into the dark windshield where your own reflection should be a stranger's and instead is Ken's face, mouth already moving.

"...Denise ain't gonna believe this route today."