Reginald Paschal

Cedric's hands smell like rope and sawdust and something metallic underneath, and you have been standing in his loading dock for forty-five seconds looking at them like they belong to somebody you used to know. Which they do. Which they did. Forty-five seconds is not even a minute, and already the itch is back — that specific hunger that has nothing to do with Cedric's aching knees or his decent little apartment or the two stagehands calling his name from the catwalk. You spun the wheel three hundred and seventy-nine times before you were ever him, and being him has told you everything it's going to. His life fits like a coat you already know the pockets of. There's a phone in his back pocket and a wheel on a page and the itch doesn't care that it's a school night in Pittsburgh. You walk to the break room, pull it up, and put in the money before you can talk yourself into gratitude.

The wheel spins somewhere behind your eyes and the world tears sideways.

You are gripping a steering wheel that is not the one your hands just knew. Dash light the color of a lit match across your knuckles — thicker knuckles, an old man's knuckles, softness under the skin where Cedric had none. Three miles of dark highway unspool in front of a windshield you didn't roll down. Your foot is already on the gas at a steady, unbothered pressure, and the turn signal is clicking for an exit ramp that means nothing to you yet, ticking green light against green light, patient, blind. The body around you is heavier through the middle, wider in the shoulders, tired in a way that isn't pain so much as settlement, like a house easing on its foundation. You did not choose this exit. Somebody else did, a mile ago, before you arrived to un-choose it.

The polo shirt is what opens first — green cotton gone soft with washing, and under it, before you can stop it, a whole morning: standing in front of the dresser mirror with the lamp off because Denise is still sleeping, buttoning two buttons and leaving the third because his neck doesn't love a collar shut all the way anymore, weight of the fabric settling over a belly he stopped fighting with years ago and just calls his. The jacket next — nylon, a little loud when it moves — and with it a whole closet's worth of church mornings, a deacon's handshake, an usher's clipboard, the particular ache of standing through a long service on a Sunday when his knees were bad.

The wheel under your palms brings the most. Ten and two, out of habit older than the car itself — a driving instructor forty years gone, a father's voice in the passenger seat of a car that doesn't exist anymore. Reginald Paschal has had this wheel in his hands for three miles of the same drive he's made a thousand times: work, before there was no more work to go to, and now just habit, just the shape of an errand he invented so the day would have a middle. Retirement sat on him strange at first, like a shirt bought for someone else, until it didn't. Now there's a porch. There's coffee that's gone cold twice already this week because he forgot it on the rail talking to Yolanda from two doors down. There's a girlfriend, warm-voiced, patient with the snoring that the machine on his nightstand is supposed to fix and mostly does. There's an ex he still calls on her birthday, not because anything is unfinished but because forty years leaves a groove a phone can find blind. Two kids, grown, one who calls every Sunday and one who calls when she needs something, and he loves them both the exact same amount and pretends otherwise to nobody, not even himself.

His body carries what his life carried: a gut that pulls at his lower back after standing, calves that remember concrete floors, a face that his own hand touches without his permission — cheek, jaw, temple — whenever his mind wanders, an old tell nobody ever pointed out to him because there was nothing to point out. A cigar on the porch on a good Saturday. A beer at a cousin's cookout and nothing stronger, nothing more, because he watched what more did to a brother of his once and it stuck.

The signal keeps clicking. Green, green, green. Three miles from a house with a porch light already on for a man who isn't coming home to it — not tonight, maybe not for longer than that, maybe not ever again, though the difference between those doesn't sit in this car with you.

You look down at your hands on the wheel — his hands, wide, dry-knuckled, a callus gone soft with disuse where a tool handle used to sit — and you turn them over like you're checking them for damage that isn't there.

"Didn't mean to go this way," you say, out loud, to no one, in his voice, and you don't correct the wheel.