Tom Sadowski

The mask is still tangled around your neck when you open your eyes, and the rain has stopped but the street is still wet, holding the sodium light in long orange smears on the asphalt. There's a wristband on your arm. You lift it up close to read it, the plastic catching the streetlamp glow, and the letters swim a second before they settle: SADOWSKI, THOMAS. You read it again like it might change. It doesn't. Something in you that was surprised a moment ago quietly stops being surprised, the way a held breath just lets go.

Your throat is dry. There's a scar cutting through your eyebrow you didn't earn, and it itches like it's been there thirty-five years, because it has. You look down and your chest is broader than it should be, softer at the middle, a wedding band snug on the left hand you're still learning the weight of. Somewhere behind you, a brownstone door is shut for the night. Somewhere else, a truck stop is waiting, three hundred miles up the interstate, with a rig that has your — his — name on the manifest clipboard.

You don't know her name yet. The wife. You'll learn it in the morning from a picture taped inside a cab visor, from the way the phone lights up at 6 a.m. with a heart emoji and no words. You'll learn that Tom Sadowski takes his coffee black and complains about it anyway, that he calls his mother on Sundays, that he has a scar over his eye from a chain that snapped loose off a flatbed nine years ago and nobody ever lets him forget how close it came to his eye instead of just the brow.

You get off the hospital bed. Your knees ache like they've hauled a decade of night shifts. A cab is idling somewhere for you, will always be idling somewhere for you now, engine ticking over in a gray dawn at some truck stop off I-80, coffee going cold on the dash, CB radio murmuring names of towns you've never seen. You'll see them. You have a year of early lights and empty lots and a wife who kisses you like she's used to missing you already.

You start walking toward the corner to find a cab, wearing a stranger's hands, a stranger's ring, the itch of a scar you'll stop noticing by June. Above you the brownstones stand shut and dark, water still finding its way off the black iron rails, and the whole wet street holds its orange light like it's waiting to see what you'll do with him.

You put one foot after the other. That's what he'd do. That's what you do now.