Rick Alvarado

Marvin Detrick's berth smells like Amtrak coffee and hand sanitizer, and the rocking of the sleeper car is the only thing keeping the ADHD static down long enough to think. Ninety minutes to Chicago Union. You have been him less than a minute, by the clock that matters, and already the leg under the little fold-down desk is bouncing without you asking it to, tapping against the frame like it's got somewhere better to be. You spun this body a life ago — a night ago, a minute ago, depending which clock you trust — and it has been fine. Gray hair, decent knees, a job that lets you watch the country go by backwards. But fine is the problem. Fine has a shift schedule. Fine has a supervisor named Denise who wants the linen count by Rockford. You did not come to the wheel 190 times to do laundry math in a moving hallway. You open the site on the phone with Marvin's own thumb, because boredom is a kind of hunger too, and hunger doesn't care whose hand is doing the feeding.

The wheel spins.

You are ten inches lower to the ground and thirty pounds softer around the middle and there is a wedding ring biting a little into flesh that has gotten used to it over decades, and both your hands — his hands — are coming off a steering wheel that is still moving, resettling low and wide on a dark dashboard that smells like pine air freshener and old coffee. The car is doing something it wasn't told to. A blinker ticks on for an exit that does not exist yet, not for another three miles, and nobody corrects it, because there is, for one full second, nobody in here to correct it. Then there is. You.

The shirt is flannel, soft at the elbows from a thousand washes, and touching it — just the weight of it against your back as you settle into the seat you're already sitting in — gives you your first flash of him: a mirror in a trailer bathroom, thin gray light, this same shirt going on sleeve by sleeve over a body that groans a little going into its shoes now, that didn't used to. Rick Alvarado, fifty-nine, buttoning up at four in the morning by a bulb that hums, his wife Dolores still a shape under the blanket behind him, one of the two kids' school pictures taped to the mirror frame gone soft and curled at the corner. He does this every morning of his life. Has for thirty years. The steering wheel under your palms gives you the drive itself, worn into the vinyl — six miles of dark road from the bakery to the trailer, every rut, every jackrabbit that's ever bolted across the beam of his headlights, done so many times his hands know the ten-and-two before his brain wakes up enough to want coffee.

The apron isn't on him now but the memory of it comes anyway, riding in on the flour still ghosted into the creases of his palms — a lifetime of proofing dough at 3 a.m., the give of it under his knuckles, warm and alive under his hands in a way nothing else in his life has ever quite managed to be. He owns three ovens and a fryer and, according to numbers he does not think about because thinking about numbers makes his leg go faster, more money than any man who smells permanently of yeast has any right to. He built that from a rented storefront and bad credit and a wife who believed him before there was reason to. He has never told anyone how close it came to not working, not even Dolores, not even the second year when he sat in this same truck in this same seat with a bottle between his knees and did not drive anywhere for forty minutes. He drinks more than he says. He quit the cigarettes eleven years ago and still, on nights like this — three miles out, radio off, mind finally quiet enough to notice its own edges — his fingers want something to do that isn't the wheel.

The turn signal is still going. Tick, tick, tick, aimed at nothing. His body — your body now — reaches down without deciding to and clicks it off, an old reflex arriving before you've fully caught up to owning it. Dashboard glow on your knuckles. Wedding band catching a green flicker off the speedometer. You are two hundred miles and one whole clock away from the last body you wore, and here it is the middle of a bright Nevada day outside this windshield's dark — which makes no sense until his own tiredness answers it for you: he closed the ovens at two, like always, and this drive home happens in true night no matter what the sun outside a Chicago window was doing when you decided to leave a train car for this. Two different middles of two different days, and only one of them is real to the man behind this face now.

You lift both hands off the wheel and look at them in the blue-black light. Red hair falls a little into your eyebrow when you tip your head down; you feel it without a mirror. Fifty-nine years old, flour-creased, a body that carries three million dollars like it doesn't know the number and a marriage like it's the only number that ever mattered. The leg is already bouncing again, patient and constant, doing what it does whether anyone's asking or not.

"Almost home," you say, to the empty cab, to Dolores who isn't there yet to hear it, to nobody — and it isn't a lie, exactly, just a thing said by someone who has no idea yet how long *home* is going to mean this.