Patrick Sullenberger

Brendan's hand is the first thing you notice, because it is not yours and has not been yours for less than a minute, and already you hate it a little — thick-fingered, a hangnail on the thumb, resting on a desk in the dark with a stapler and a mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST ASSISTANT that some office-mate thought was funny. You are sitting in his cubicle at eleven at night because Brendan Kowalczyk apparently sometimes comes in when he can't sleep, and that fact alone — that this is a man who comes back to the office he hates because his apartment is worse — decides it before you've even decided it. You have been him for fifty seconds. You do not want fifty more. The chair creaks under weight that isn't distributed the way you like, the fluorescents hum, and somewhere down the beige hallway a vending machine cycles its compressor like a held breath. You open the laptop. The site loads the way it always loads, patient, grey, a wheel rendered in soft 3D like something that should be selling watches. You do not think about the other 947 men between you and the last time you felt anything close to your own weight. You think: not this. Not tonight. You spin.

The wheel is still going when the car isn't yours anymore.

Your — his — hands are already moving before you arrive, coming off ten-and-two and dropping lower and wider on a wheel still warm from grip, and the highway is sliding past dark and dotted with the taillights of people who have somewhere to be. The seatbelt is tight across a chest wider than the one you left, real muscle under a navy shirt, forearms with the raised ridges of old ink. The dash light is green-blue on knuckles that are not chewed, not soft, a plain wedge of gold on the left hand catching it. Your foot — his foot — eases off the gas a half-second before you'd have thought to. The turn signal clicks on, steady, patient, ticking for an exit that is not his.

The shirt is what opens first — not the fabric so much as the weight of it against your shoulders, and through it comes a hallway you've never walked, tile floor, a wife's voice from another room saying *the Petersons moved their reservation, can you believe that*, and a hand — his hand — buttoning the top button while looking in a mirror that has a kid's handprint on it in blue paint, low down, at knee height, never wiped off because nobody in the house wants to be the one who wipes it off. The shirt went on this morning in that light, sleeve first, right arm, the tattoo on the inside of the forearm catching the bathroom bulb — a name, Liliana, and a date under it, and under the date a second one on the other arm you can't read from inside your own skin but you feel the weight of it anyway, the specific gravity of a thing you got inked into you so you'd never for one day forget it. There is a third child somewhere in the feeling too, younger, a weight you've carried on a hip that these arms know exactly how to hold, elbow crooked at the right angle without thinking.

The wheel gives you the belt next — the click of it, the automatic tightening, a body reaching for it a thousand times without deciding to — and through the leather comes the restaurant, the actual smell of it, garlic and candle wax and the particular hum of a Friday dining room at capacity, a hostess stand with a reservation book he still keeps on paper because the tablet crashed on him once during a rush and he swore, actually swore, in front of a four-top waiting for their table. You feel his patience arrive whole, unhurried, a man who has learned to make forty people feel like they are the only ones waiting. You feel the ache low in his back from being on his feet twelve hours, the specific tiredness of a body that works hard and is proud of working hard, muscular not from a gym but from carrying, moving, standing. Clean-shaven jaw, still smooth from a razor pulled this morning in that same bathroom with the handprint, his wife's voice again, further back this time, younger — *stay still, you're gonna cut yourself laughing* — and you feel the laugh in his chest before you feel anything else of hers.

The keys at his hip, when your fingers brush them without meaning to, give you the loudest thing yet: a driveway, dry palms, late sun sliding orange down a stucco wall, him getting home later than he wanted and the porch light already on because she leaves it on, always, and three kids' voices coming through a screen door before he's even out of the car. Home. Three miles out and closing, and none of it — not one second of it — is going to happen the way he thinks it's going to happen, because the signal is already on, already ticking, for an exit he has never taken in his life.

You look down. His hand — your hand, now, until it isn't — is still low on the wheel, wedding band catching the dash light, and you turn it over slowly the way you always do, checking the seams of a life you didn't build and get to spend anyway.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, to the empty highway, to him if any part of him is still in the walls of this. "Let's see how long you last."