Rigoberto Salcedo

The griddle in front of you is still ticking heat when you decide. Patrick Dolezal's forearms ache to the elbow, that specific burn of forty years of flattening smashburgers for people who will never know his name, and the ticket rail has six orders on it and the sous chef is yelling about the fryer, and you think: not this again, not tonight, not for less than fifteen an hour. Less than a minute in him and already you know the whole rest of it, the way you always do — the trailer he goes home to, the knee that's going to need surgery he can't afford, the freckles across his nose that some line cook in some other city was probably born with too, small mercy, small coincidence. You wipe your hands on your apron, tell the sous chef you're taking five, and go stand in the walk-in where your phone gets no grease on it. The site loads the way it always loads. The wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, which is how you like it — a decision made by momentum instead of will, so it never quite feels like a choice.

You pay. You spin. The cold of the walk-in is the last thing that belongs to you.

And now there is a wheel under your hands, black plastic gone slightly tacky with age, and the highway is dark on both sides and a dashboard glows amber against knuckles that are not the knuckles you left a half-second ago — thicker, browner, a plain gold band catching the light at the base of the ring finger. Your hands are already moving without you: they come off ten-and-two, resettle lower, wider, easy, like a man leaning back on a porch rail. The turn signal clicks on, patient, for an exit that some other part of you — some part that is about to arrive whether you want it or not — knows isn't the right one.

Then it comes, the way it always comes, through what you're touching and nowhere else. The wheel first: thirty years of hands on this exact texture, worn smooth in two spots from thumbs, and under that a whole Tuesday morning at a wet bench, buckets of ranunculus and eucalyptus crowding his boots, the particular ache of standing on concrete since five a.m. The shirt against your back — a soft, small-checked button-down, not the work shirt, this one clean for driving home — gives you the morning it went on: him buttoning it one-handed in front of the bathroom mirror while his wife, Marisol, brushed her teeth beside him, both of them half-asleep, her elbow catching his ribs, neither of them minding. Three kids' names surface without being asked for — Ana, Mateo, the baby, Sofia, seven now, not a baby at all, he corrects himself even now, out of habit, out of love. There's an ex-wife somewhere behind that, Diane, a marriage that ended the way plants die when you stop noticing them, not from cruelty, just from not looking, and the guilt of that sits in his chest permanently, low and familiar as heartburn.

The ring gives you the wedding — a courtyard, string lights, his mother crying because he'd married again and this time, she said, this time you look at her like she's the whole garden. He does. Marisol runs the shop's books and doesn't know a peony from a dahlia and he loves her enormously and specifically for that, for the one part of his life she doesn't touch.

His body settles into you like sediment: five-nine, soft through the middle in the way of a man who eats standing up between deliveries, freckles warm across a nose that's been sunburned since childhood in a city that doesn't forgive Aprils. Nothing hurts exactly, but there's a tiredness sitting in the lower back that's been there since the Clinton administration, and cholesterol numbers he's supposed to think about and doesn't. The fingers on the wheel twitch — not nerves, just habit, the drumming his hands do when they're empty of stems and shears and have nothing to trim. He was three miles from a house with a porch light on and a wife who'd be annoyed he was late again, flower shop always running him late, and none of that is going to happen now, and the highway keeps sliding under tires that are turning toward an exit that isn't his, that he — that you — chose in the half-second before either of you existed here.

You bring the hands back to the wheel, straighten it, cancel the signal. Look down at them in the dash light — the wedding band, the soil still dark under one thumbnail no matter how many times this man scrubs.

"Not yet," you say, to no one, to the empty back seat, to Marisol's porch light still three miles off. "Not yet."

The wheel is already cooling somewhere in Houston, forgotten, waiting for whenever the wanting comes back around.