Sean Dorrance

The cab of the truck smells like burnt coffee and the pine air freshener that stopped working weeks ago. Noon light through the windshield lands flat and merciless on Kevin Osterhaus's forearms, the sunburn line where his sleeve usually sits, the dad-softness under a shirt gone gray from washing. You have had him less than a minute and you already know the thing that sent you back: the ache low in his gut from a gas station burrito, the CB radio crackling with a voice that isn't for you, four more hours of flat road to Salina and nothing at the end of it but a motel with a bad AC unit. You spun once and got a man whose whole life is the distance between two points. It was never going to hold you. You open the app on his phone with his blunt, dry-knuckled thumb, and you spin again before you can talk yourself out of it, because that's the thing about Kevin — thirty seconds in and already you're doing math on how many more Kansases there are.

The wheel spins somewhere that isn't a place at all, and then —

You are sitting. That's the first thing, the surprise of it, weight dropped into cushions instead of a driver's seat, and there's a couch giving under you, soft and old, a coffee table crowded with white cartons steaming faintly, and in your hand — his hand, now, immediately and completely his — half a fortune cookie, cracked clean along its curve, and a paper slip pinched between two fingers, drawn halfway out.

You read it.

Then you read it again, slower, because something in the wanting hadn't finished when the words ran out, and your mouth — his mouth — keeps moving a beat past where the sentence stopped, shaping a word that isn't on the paper anymore. Nobody notices. Nobody is here to notice. The slip folds into quarters under a thumb that already knows the crease, tucks itself into a shirt pocket like it's done this before, and the room goes on without him.

The shirt is flannel, red and green plaid, sleeves shoved up past the elbow, and the second your back settles against the couch cushion the day comes in through the fabric — not a memory so much as a temperature. This morning. Standing in front of a mirror with the bathroom fan roaring because the shower ran too long and steamed the glass, pulling this shirt off a hook by the door because it was the first thing his hand found, and underneath it the gray tee he's had since the shop's five-year anniversary, soft at the collar from a hundred washes. He'd almost put on the black one — the work shirt, the one that doesn't show ink or stains — and then remembered it was his day off and felt something loosen in his chest at the thought of it. A day off. Just this, a couch, a lamp, the particular hush of an apartment three streets back from the water where you can still hear it if the AC unit isn't running.

The takeout containers give you the rest in a rush: General Tso's from the place on 8th, ordered because he didn't feel like cooking, eaten a little too fast, chopsticks abandoned for fingers halfway through. Under that, further back, a booth in this same restaurant two years ago with her across the table — the ex, always just there at the edge of things, laughing at something he said with her mouth still full, before it went the way it went, before the apartment got quieter than he liked and he started ordering for one and eating in front of the television with the sound low. He still thinks of her on Mondays for no reason he's ever nailed down. Maybe because Mondays used to be their day, back when his schedule ran backward from everyone else's.

The scar in his eyebrow answers when you notice it's there, a message from nerve to nerve: a bar in Jacksonville, twenty-four years old, a stool that wasn't as steady as it looked and a corner of a pool table that was. Six stitches. His buddy from the unit driving him to the ER laughing so hard he nearly missed the turn. The insignia on his forearm burns a little warmer than the rest of the ink when you find it, older than the roses and the dagger and the banner that says BEFORE HONOR, older than the shop, older than most things he's built since — four years of a life measured in a different currency than tips and flash sheets, a life he doesn't talk about much except with his hands, when he's inking someone else's memory of it onto someone else's skin and his own go quiet and steady and sure. That's the thing his body knows without being told: the weight of a machine buzzing in his grip, the angle of a wrist held just so for four hours, the particular calm of making something permanent on another person while his own chest carries a scar nobody drew on purpose.

He's thirty-three. There's a thickness starting at the middle that wasn't there five years ago, a low drag behind the sternum some mornings that he blames on the cigars and never quite quits, and a snore bad enough that the ex used to elbow him awake at 3 a.m. more nights than either of them said out loud. He sleeps alone now and doesn't mind the quiet of it, mostly, except when he does. Bald head, still getting used to it eight years on from the day he stopped fighting the hairline and just shaved the whole thing — best decision he ever made twice.

You feel all of it land at once, the good parts and the ordinary parts, sitting heavier in him than in anyone you've worn before, because this one isn't going anywhere. No highway pulling him forward. Just a Monday afternoon off, chopsticks, an ocean two streets away breathing salt into the room through a cracked balcony door.

You look down. The hand holding the folded slip has ink across two knuckles you can't read from this angle, a hangnail on the thumb, a callus on the middle finger shaped exactly like the grip of a tattoo machine.

You turn it over once, slow, like it might answer you.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to no one, in his voice, and you don't know yet if you're going to stay long enough to open the shop tomorrow.