Martin Doyle

Rodrigo Palomares has been yours for less than a minute, and already he is wrong. You are standing in his kitchen in Los Angeles with the light going orange on the tile. His scarred eyebrow itches. His stomach hangs over his belt the way he apparently liked it to. The first thing you did with him was open the refrigerator, and all you wanted from it was a different life. A classroom's worth of other people's children is somewhere in him, and you don't want it. You want to drive something. You want to be a man whose hands know a thing. You put his phone face-down on the counter and open the page with the wheel.

You pay. You spin. The wheel ticks and slows.

Then there is a dark highway, and your hands are at ten and two.

The dash glow lies green across your knuckles. The truck drifts a foot toward the line and you bring it back in one smooth pull, without deciding to. Your hands let go of the wheel, then settle lower and wider, and the turn signal ticks on for an exit that is not his.

The steering wheel is cracked vinyl under your palms, and the first thing it gives you is not yours. It is a night on this same road with a girl asleep in the back seat, her small shoes against the door, and him driving at exactly the speed limit for forty miles so she would not wake. He loved that. It rises in you as pure tenderness, and you did not earn it.

Your sleeve brushes your wrist, and the flannel opens up the morning. His thumbs work the buttons upward in the dark of a bedroom, because the room is quiet now and he does not turn on the light. The vest hangs on the hook by the door, and the sawdust in the collar makes him feel employed. He does not look at the pale band on his ring finger. He has stopped looking at it, and the stopping is a habit of its own.

Your jaw is clenched. You find it only now: the hinge aches, and the molars have been pressed together for miles. The beard lies heavy on your chest and you feel it move when you swallow. The left eye drifts outward. You can feel it as a faint slackness behind the lid, and you know he spent a childhood being told to look at people straight. The knowledge comes with shame, and also with a stubbornness that is almost fond.

The inside of your upper arm warms against the seat belt, where the ink is. A name and a date. You do not need to see it. Sarah, 2001 arrives as a kitchen with yellow curtains, a wedding he paid for in installments, and a plain fight about nothing that ended it years later. Her voice on the phone is tired and civil. There are two children, and the ache is for both of them at once.

Your back is stiff, forty-nine years of lifting plywood stacked in the vertebrae. Your forearms are strong. Your right hand already reaches to check the mirror, and it is a trained, easy motion. The exit slides closer under the signal, an exit he would never have taken tonight. You do not know yet where it goes.

You lift one hand from the wheel and turn it over in the green light. The knuckles are thick and the nails are chipped, and there is a pale line where a ring was. You look up into the dark glass.

"Well," you say, in his low rough voice. "Look at that."

The exit is close. You wonder how long he stays, whether the wanting comes back at the next light or in a year, and you keep the signal on.