Patrick Lowell Dunn

You are Gordon Mah, and you are standing at the window of an office on the fourth floor, watching the lot empty out. The day is nearly over. Your knees ache in the particular way of a man of fifty-six who sat through a budget review. The coffee in your hand has gone cold, and you have been holding it long enough to feel your own pulse in the paper cup.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is what you cannot explain. He has a good chair, a good salary, a wife's voice on the phone saying *what do you want for dinner*, and you answered *whatever* in a voice that belonged to somebody who would mean it. Hours ago you caught yourself straightening a stack of folders that were already straight, and understood that you were doing his habit and not wanting anything of your own. You wanted to be in a body that did not know what you were about to do with it. You wanted the drop.

You set the cup on the sill. The page is already open on the laptop, the wheel in its patient circle. You pay, you spin, and Gordon Mah is a coat that falls off you.

Dark. Dash glow on your knuckles. A road leaning left under a sky going from orange to ink.

You are in the middle of a lane, both hands on a wheel, the car drifting a foot toward the line. You pull it back straight in one smooth motion, and your hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider, because they are yours now and they want it that way. Your thumb finds the stalk and the turn signal ticks on for an exit that is not his. Someone's. Yours.

Then the memories start, through whatever you touch.

The wheel is cracked leather, warm, and under your palms comes a flash: a small seat behind you, a child's shoe kicking the back of it, and a feeling like a fist closing gently around his chest. *Hold on, bud, almost home.* That is his tenderness. It is not yours, and it hurts to carry.

The flannel on your back is soft from washing. It gives you the morning, sleeve by sleeve: the bedroom still dim, his wife's breathing, the right arm in first because the left shoulder complains, buttons done from the bottom, a gray T-shirt under it because the mornings are cold in the trench until the sun comes. The high-vis shirt hangs on a hook in the truck bed. He did up the cuffs with his thick fingers and thought about nothing. The nothing was the best of it.

The ring is a small cold circle when your thumb brushes it. It gives you a courthouse step and a cheap bouquet. It also gives you an old girlfriend he has not thought of in years, a laugh across a kitchen, a flicker of what-if gone quickly as a match. He has never told anyone about the evening he drove to her street and sat there with the engine off. He turned around. He was proud of that and ashamed he had gone.

Under your lip is a pouch of nicotine, a faint burn. It hands you the first break of every morning, thermos steam, the mini excavator ticking as it cools, spoil piled beside the trench. Your back remembers the shovel before you do. You are thirty-eight, heavy through the middle, and strong in the forearms and the low back. Tonight there is a dull ache in your left shoulder, and the muscle in your thighs is spent. Your fingers are drumming on the wheel without being told.

Rosary beads hang from the mirror. A tiny weight swings and clicks.

Three miles from home, the highway says in green. You have missed nothing yet.

You lift your right hand off the wheel and turn it over under the dash light. It is wide, scarred by work you cannot feel the history of, and the ring sits on it like a promise. It is not yours. You close the fingers and open them.

"Hello, Patrick," you say, in his voice, to the windshield, and the exit slides toward you.

You do not know how long you get to keep this. Your thumb is already restless on the wheel.