Michael Reed

Walter Nakamura's knees ache on the kitchen chair, sixty-five years of them, and the laptop is open to the wheel. I have been him for less than a minute. He has a spare room full of model trains and a wife's reading glasses on the sill, and none of it is mine. The coffee he made tastes like the inside of a cup. I wanted a man in the middle of something, a man with a road under him. So I press the key with his big, slow, spotted finger, and the kitchen goes out.

Dark. A hum under me, tires on seams. Dash glow green on my knuckles, my hands at ten and two, and the car drifting a foot toward the line. I pull it back in one smooth stroke, and the hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider, as though they know something I don't. My left leg is bouncing against the pedal well and will not stop. My thumb finds the signal stalk and the light ticks on, left or right, for an exit that isn't his. I leave it on.

Then the sweater. Navy, waffle-knit, a plaid collar at my throat, and the wool at the wrist is the first key. His wife bought it, at a church sale, folded it on the bed with the tag still pinned: *you never dress for anything but work.* This morning he pulled it over the undershirt and felt, absurdly, looked after. The collar scratches the freshly shaved jaw. He shaved at four o'clock, in the locker room, with a cold tap, because he does it before he goes home, so no day-smell comes in with him.

The wheel is the second key, and the ring on my left hand clicks against it. A gate. A corridor of painted cinderblock, the color of old teeth, and the keys on the retractor at his hip. Eleven years of counting heads. He hates the sound a gate makes closing, and he also loves it, because it means everyone is where they should be. Under the hate and the love is a night in a dayroom when a boy half his age asked him, quietly, to pray with him. He did. He has told no one. His lips remember the Hail Mary.

The jeans, stiff at the knee. The boots, their steel toes pressing on a bouncing foot. The leg that never stops: it used to keep time to a cigarette. Fourteen months quit. Six years sober. His mouth still goes looking for both at red lights. I feel the hunger as a hollow behind the molars, and I know it better than he'd like.

Photographs come from the visor, from nothing. Two kids in the back seat, a girl asleep against a window, a boy counting trucks aloud. Their weight is in his chest. And one girl from before, a summer, a porch, someone he doesn't call. She is only a smell of rain on a screen door.

His checking account is a held breath. His rowhouse has steps worn hollow, and he is three miles from them.

My heart is a good one, a little fast. His shoulders hold the day's tension like a coat. His hands know the wheel, and they know how to restrain a man, and they know how to be gentle with a sleeping child. I lift the right one off the wheel, turn it over under the dash light, and look at the pale line where the ring has sat for years.

I look up at the dark windshield and say, "Okay."

I don't know how long I keep him. The wanting is already stirring, small and patient, like the leg, like the signal, still ticking for an exit.