Owen Rhoades

Wesley Brightwater's kitchen smells like coffee gone cold an hour ago. You are still getting used to this body's knees, the way they announce themselves on the linoleum, the cleft in this chin you catch in the microwave door's reflection. Sixty-two years old, muscular gone soft, retired from something you never bothered to learn the name of because it didn't matter — none of it ever matters past the first week. You have had him less than a minute of his own life and already the chair by the window is calling to you the way every chair in every borrowed body eventually does: too familiar, too settled, too much like the end of a road instead of the middle of one. You spun three days ago and told yourself this one would be different, that a man with money in the bank and bad knees and nowhere he had to be was a rest, a vacation from wanting. It lasted a minute. The phone is already in your hand — his hand — thumb finding the site without being asked, the way an old habit finds a doorknob in the dark. You don't examine it too hard. You never do. You spin.

The pillow smell hits before anything else — someone else's fabric softener, cheap and floral, and then breath that isn't ragged anymore but slow and deep, pulled in through a nose that isn't yours. The arm that was hanging off the mattress lifts on its own, folds up and over, and the whole body turns onto its back like it's rehearsed this a hundred times, though something underneath tells you it hasn't, not once. Hands come together at the chest, fingers lacing, and you lie there behind a stranger's closed eyelids feeling how narrow this frame is after the wide, tired bulk you just left — ribs closer to the skin, a leanness that has never had to think about its own weight. Light comes through a gap in heavy curtains in one hard vertical line. Somewhere outside, a dog. Somewhere far past that, gravel and wire and heat already building though it's barely past dawn here. You open his eyes.

The ceiling fan isn't moving. The room is a rented kind of tidy, a hotel-adjacent quiet, curtains too thick for a house that was built to let the sun in. Your hand — his hand — finds the ring on the way down off his chest, thumb turning it before you've told it to, and that's the first door. It swings open onto a courthouse hallway, fluorescent-lit, a woman in a green dress holding both his hands and laughing because the JP mispronounced his middle name. Marianne. The ring keeps turning and gives you five more years in one motion — her voice on speakerphone through the truck's Bluetooth at three in the morning outside Amarillo, her voice smaller and tighter more recently, a silence on the line last month that had nothing to do with bad reception. You feel, underneath your own indifference to any of this, his low steady ache about it — not a fight exactly, just a distance that crept in around the time she started asking when he'd be done with the long hauls for good.

Your palm finds the sheet under you, cotton gone soft with washing, and that gives you the apartment before this one — no, not an apartment, a name: Dana. A recent thing, over now, ended on a truck-stop payphone-quiet parking lot with her crying and him saying sorry in a voice that meant it and still didn't change anything. You feel his guilt about it sitting exactly where guilt sits in a chest that prays five times a day and still cannot make its own wanting behave. He does that here, you learn — unrolls a mat in motel rooms just like this one, faces a direction he's checked twice on his phone, says words you don't know the shape of but his mouth does, perfectly, without hesitation. That's under your feet too, somehow, though your feet haven't touched the floor yet — a physical memory of kneeling on cheap carpet at first light, the exact one you're in now, except usually he's already up by the time the sun does this to the curtain.

You sit up. The t-shirt against your back is his, gray, thin at the collar from a hundred washes, and it gives you the morning he put it on — not this morning, some other one, sleep still on him, humming along to the radio while he found the sleeve, one arm and then the other, the small ordinary competence of a body that has dressed itself ten thousand times without once being watched doing it. Skinny arms, freckled, forearms stronger than they look because forty-three years old and lean does not mean weak — this body has wrestled tie-down straps in Panhandle wind and hasn't lost yet. Something in the lower back twinges when you shift, an old complaint from a mattress in a cab that was never quite long enough for him. You feel that as his, a low familiar note, not yours to mind but yours to have anyway now.

You look at your hands. Pale, freckled, a plain gold band on the left one, already turning itself between finger and thumb though nobody told it to. You lift your eyes off it, past the gap in the curtain where the light is coming in that vertical line, toward wherever the lens of the world is pointed at you right now, and you say, in a voice you didn't choose and are already fond of the sound of:

"Marianne, I'm up."

Nobody answers. It's Monday. It could be years before you spin again, or it could be before he's even found his boots.