Rolando Madueño

You're lying in Liam Okafor's bed at three in the morning, and you can't sleep because his body won't let you.

Two days and one hour in this one, and it's a good body — twenty-one, strong hands, the kind of forearms that mean something when he tightens a wire nut, and you liked that for about six hours. But there's a thing this body can't do, which is stop itching. Not on the skin. Underneath it, where the wanting lives, the part of you that doesn't belong to Liam and never will. You spent yesterday on a job site pulling conduit through a ceiling, sweating in his skin, competent in his hands, thinking about your phone in his pocket the whole time. That's the tell. When you start thinking about the phone instead of the wall you're facing, you know the clock's run out on wanting to stay.

So at three in the morning, Houston, everyone in this house asleep, you get up off Liam's mattress in Liam's dark room and you go to the kitchen table where the laptop is, and you open vessel.cards, and you spin the wheel, quiet, greedy, telling yourself this is the last one for a while.

—

The dash light is green-gray on your knuckles and there is a wheel under your palms, wider than Liam's, older leather, cracked at the seam by your left thumb. Your hands are heavier now, shorter fingers, a small cold ring of metal at the base of one that isn't a ring, hasn't been a ring in a long time, just the ghost-pale line where one was. The car is drifting. You feel it before you correct it — a foot toward the center line — and your hands, his hands, pull it back in one motion so smooth it's like the car remembers how even if you don't yet. Then they come off the wheel and reset, lower, wider, and your thumb finds the turn signal and clicks it down for an exit that means nothing to you.

Three miles from a home you've never seen.

The shirt is what opens him first — worn cotton, navy, softened by a hundred washes, and under it his shoulder aches faint and familiar the way a shoulder aches after fourteen hours in a seat, and that ache hands you a flash: a loading dock in Harrisburg, rain on the windshield, a dispatcher's voice on the radio saying *you're clear, Madueño, go home.* Then more, faster. The name comes with it, unasked. Rolando. Everyone calls him Ro at the yard.

The earring — you feel its small weight when your head tips, and it brings back a night in Kensington eleven years ago, a tattoo parlor with a busted air conditioner, his brother-in-law laughing, needle going into his arm, the letters M-A-D-N-O, his kids' names woven into each other because he couldn't pick just one to put there and Marisol had said *put all of them then, dummy,* and he had, and then the date under it, the year the last one was born. He does not think of Marisol as his ex-wife when the memory comes. He thinks of her as the answer to a question nobody in his life has stopped asking him: *what happened to you two?* Nothing happened. Time happened. She wanted a man who was home. He was a man who was three miles from home about four hundred nights a year, and somewhere in there the wanting on both sides wore through like a tire.

The jeans against your legs give you the morning he put them on — his own bedroom, gray light, a duffel already packed by the door, coffee going cold on the dresser, the small ordinary ritual of a work morning, belt through the loops, keys off the hook by the door with the church key and the extra house key that doesn't open anything anymore because she changed the locks two years back and never told him and he found out standing on her porch at Christmas holding a key that was just a key now. He didn't say anything. He never says anything. That's the whole shape of him, maybe — a big quiet space where the saying-something should be.

The wheel itself, under both palms now, gives you fourteen years of double-clutching on the Turnpike, a body that knows how to sit still at seventy miles an hour for eleven hours and call it a living. Your shoulders — his shoulders — carry that the way a bridge carries load, evenly, without complaint, average build gone a little soft at the middle, a little strong at the forearm, gray coming into hair that used to be black the way frost comes into a window, from the edges in. Nothing hurts exactly. Everything is tired in the specific way of a man who is thirty-seven and has been thirty-seven for what feels like a long time.

The signal keeps ticking. Green light, dash glow, a turn that isn't his ahead of you in the dark, and under it all a small warm ember that isn't yours either — something spiritual he never talks about, a half-formed feeling that the road takes care of him if he doesn't ask it for too much.

You look down at your hands on the lower part of the wheel — silver hoop swinging faint at the edge of your eye, tan line on the ring finger catching the dash light — and you turn one hand over like you're checking it's real.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty cab, in a voice that isn't yours and wasn't his either five seconds ago. "Okay. Let's see where you live."