Reginald Odom

Derek Cho's hands are shaking, and they are not even his.

Three minutes in this body and already you know it was a mistake. Not the wheel — the wheel is never a mistake — but this one, this soldier, this cauliflower ear and this flat Toronto light coming through a barracks window on a Sunday nobody gave him off. He is fast and he is strong and there is something wrong with his knee that flares when he sits too long, and you can feel it flare now, sitting on the edge of his bunk with his dog tags cold against his sternum, and you think: three minutes and I am already bored of being young. That is the truth of it, the one you would not say out loud even to yourself if the site could hear you. Twenty-five men and you are chasing something you cannot name and it is not adventure anymore, it is appetite, plain and a little ugly, and you have stopped pretending otherwise. You want the next one before you have finished this one. You always do.

You open the site on his phone, his thumb — Cho's thumb, twenty-three years old, a scar across the knuckle you never asked about and never will now — and the wheel is already spinning in your head before it spins on the screen.

You pay. You spin.

—

The hose is running somewhere behind you, hissing against concrete, and there is a sponge in your hand, heavy with suds, and the car door under it is silver and warm from a sun that is not as high here as it was in Toronto. Your grip changes halfway down the panel — thumb tucking under, wrist rolling in small tight circles, a motion you did not choose and did not know until it was already happening — and behind you, for the first time all afternoon, the swirl marks stop.

You are heavier. Lower to the ground. Your right hand does not answer the way a hand should; it is cool and sure and exact, and when you look at it — no, not yet, not yet, there is a sponge, there is a door, there is soap running down in white ropes toward your sneakers — you understand without looking that something has replaced it.

—

The shirt is what gives him to you first. Navy, a collar gone soft at the point, a small oil stain on the hem he stopped noticing years ago — and through it comes the morning: him standing in front of a dresser mirror in a house that echoes a little too much now, pulling this shirt over his head one-armed, practiced, no fumbling, the prosthetic arm still on the nightstand charging because Sundays he doesn't always bother early. He'd clipped it on after coffee. Habit, not need. Reginald Odom does not need the hand to know he is himself.

The name arrives with the smell of the driveway — cut grass, hose-water, the particular mildew of a garage that floods a little every spring. Reginald. Reggie to the guys at the Marriott downtown, to his sister, to nobody else anymore, not since Danette stopped calling him anything at all three years back. The lanyard is not around his neck right now but you feel where it usually sits anyway, that groove worn into the muscle memory of his collarbone from a decade of conferences and hotel lobbies, badge turned backward so nobody reads his name before he's ready to give it.

The sponge keeps moving and it brings the rest.

Three kids — Marcus, grown and short-tempered like his mother; Alicia, who calls on Sundays without fail, which is its own small mercy; and Jayden, the youngest, seventeen, who still needs picking up from places at hours that used to enrage Reggie and now just make him tired in a way he doesn't mind. Danette's face comes with the ache in his knuckles — not his knuckles, his other hand's, the flesh one, chewed at the nail edges from forty years of a habit he can't break even now, prosthetic making it a lopsided tell, one hand ragged, one hand smooth as a showroom mannequin's. She used to grab that hand at dinner, hold it still. *You're a grown man, Reg.* He is. He still bites anyway.

The accident comes through the wet rubber smell of the hose, though it isn't the hose's fault — a warehouse job twenty years back, before sales, before any of this, before three kids had fathers instead of a father with a story. He doesn't dwell there. The body doesn't let you; it moves past the memory the way it moved past the injury itself, briskly, professionally, a man who sells for a living and has therefore made peace with being looked at.

The reflux flares faintly at the back of your throat — his throat — some ghost of coffee and Tums and hotel continental breakfasts, and underneath that a low current of good living: steak on Fridays, a whiskey most nights, not two, just most nights one and sometimes a careless second, church every few Sundays when the guilt outweighs the sleep-in, an ex-girlfriend's number still saved under a name that isn't Danette's, the one before her, the one he still sometimes almost calls. Nothing acted on. Just carried, the way the weight in his gut is carried, the way the missing hand is carried, easily, because he has had two decades' practice carrying things.

He is good at his job. Great, even — the kind of great that pays for a brownstone stoop and three kids' tuitions and doesn't ask too much of a man past fifty-seven except that he keep smiling at strangers in blue suits under fluorescent lobby light. He was between meetings an hour ago in his head, or he will be, in whatever version of today keeps going once you let go of this driveway.

The sponge drips. The hose keeps running behind you, forgotten, flooding the gutter.

—

You lift the prosthetic first, turning it slow in the weak sun, watching light slide off matte black knuckles that don't flex the way a hand should, that flex better. Then the other one — his, yours now, thick-fingered, nails bitten close, a little soap caught in the cuticle.

You look up. Somewhere down the block a dog is barking at the hose's hiss, and the car in front of you is half-clean, one door bright, the rest still filmed with a week of rain and pollen.

"Whose turn is it," you say, to no one, in a voice thicker and older than the one you had three minutes and one country ago, and you almost laugh, because you don't know yet — not how long, not when the wanting comes back, not whether you finish washing this car or leave it half-done in the driveway and go looking for the wheel again before the soap even dries.