Tanner Joel Whitaker

The tow truck's dome light is still ticking as it cools, and I am sitting in Walter Kessinger's cab with his thermos between my boots and a dispatch radio muttering about a jackknifed trailer forty miles out. His beard is itching. The scar through his eyebrow pulls whenever I frown, and I have been frowning for an hour. The page is open on the phone propped against the wheel, the wheel itself turning slowly in its little window, waiting.

He is a good body. Fifty-six, solid in the gut, the shoulders of a man who has hauled chain all his life. Nothing is wrong with him. But a few minutes ago I looked at the road, black and straight to the horizon, and I knew that I would drive it, and drive it, and know every mile of it from borrowed memory, and none of it would be mine. Something in me wanted a different weight. I do not say it aloud. I press the button with Walter's thick thumb.

The kerb is gone from under me. My foot comes down on nothing, the whole of a tall man lurches forward, and my palm slaps cold wet metal, a parked car's roof, beaded with rain. I catch myself. My breath is sour with beer. The street tilts and rights itself.

Then the shirt begins.

Black cotton, against my back, thin from washing. A morning: he stands in a small bedroom, pulls it from the second drawer, the one that sticks, and he is thinking about nothing, about the shelf reset he has to finish before the truck comes. Left arm through first, always. The jacket is heavier, canvas gone soft, and its collar rubs my neck; in its pocket my fingers find a stick of gum, foil crackling, and without asking I am peeling it and folding it onto my tongue. Mint. His mouth knows the motion better than I do. He quit cigarettes four years ago and the gum is where the wanting went. A flash: his grandmother's kitchen, a rosary on a hook by the window, her hand over his small one, the Our Father mumbled too fast. Church on Sundays still, the back pew, the cold of the holy water on his fingers.

The boots on the wet concrete. Steel toes, resoled once. Through them I get the aisle: fluorescent hum, the pricing gun's clack, boxes of routers and speakers squared to the shelf edge, an hour of it, every night shift of it. Arms strong and a little tired from lifting. A tight ache in the left knee. Twenty-seven years of this frame, and some savings, patient numbers in an account he checks and never touches. The mole high on my cheek: I touch it and a girl's thumb is there, long ago, laughing. Nobody since, not really. Walking home the long way because the apartment is quiet.

Hair against my ears, damp. Gray eyes, wide and clear now. The stumble is gone from my legs. I let go of the car.

I lift my hand, the one that held the roof, and turn it over. Calluses along the base of the fingers. Unfamiliar, warm, wet with rain. Then I look up, down the empty street, the closed diner's sign buzzing.

"Okay," I say, in his voice, low. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."