Trent Okamura

The cab smells like Rolando's cigarettes even though Rolando never smoked, some ghost of the last owner baked into the vinyl, and you sit in his idling truck at a truck stop outside Allentown at three in the morning, engine off, everyone in the world asleep except you. Three minutes in this one and already the itch is back, the old itch, worse than boredom — you flex his gray-haired hands on the wheel and feel how they ache at the knuckle, feel the five-foot-seven of him folded into a cab built for someone taller, and you think: no. Not this one. Not a man with bad knees and a CB radio and a load of frozen poultry due in Scranton. You open the site on your phone, the glow of it lighting the dashboard, and you don't even say goodbye to him, because there was no him left to say it to. You spin.

The gym noise arrives before you do — clank of plates, a stereo playing something with too much bass — and then you are sitting on a bench under a rack, blowing through your teeth, except the breath stops a beat early and your hands go two inches wider on the bar than they've gone all year, and you press, slow, grinding, your face doing none of the things a last rep does. Nobody around you notices. Why would they. You are just a man finishing a set.

The bar goes back into the rack with a sound like a bell, and your arms drop, and that's when it starts coming — not from thinking, from touching. The knurling of the bar is still printed into your palms and it brings a flash of a thousand other bars, other gyms, a locker room in the academy at twenty-three, the particular fear of the physical test, a drill instructor's voice. You let go of the bar and the flash goes with it, but your hands find your knees, forearms on them exactly like the picture would show if anyone were watching, and the shirt sticks to your back with real sweat, and that brings something else: this morning, before the sun, pulling this same gray T-shirt off a doorknob in a bedroom in a pastel building near the water, quiet so you wouldn't wake her. Her name comes with the shirt — Dana — and the smell of her shampoo still in the room, and the two kids' names on a whiteboard on the fridge, a chore chart, a crayon drawing taped up sideways. You feel the love of it before you feel anything else, plain and unglamorous, the weight of being needed by people who are asleep right now assuming you'll be there when they wake.

Your body under all this is thin for its height, all long bone, six-four folded onto a bench meant for someone shorter, and forty-two years sit in it the way they sit in a man who runs on adrenaline and drinks a little too much wine with dinner most nights and has never once told anyone about the tightness that comes sometimes in his chest on a bad shift, a tightness that is, right now, this second, a small warning nobody in this gym is built to hear. Your jaw itches with the old habit — nails bitten to nothing, a tell his girlfriend teases him about, his ex used to hate it — and there's a flash of the ex, sharper than expected, a fight in a kitchen years ago, a slammed door, a kid conceived before any of that went wrong, and you understand without being told that this man has two lives running parallel down two women, both still open, both still costing him something.

The mole is there under your fingers when you touch your own cheek, the one thing anyone would notice first, and it brings — nothing, just his own hand knowing its own face, the way you touch a mole you've had forty-two years without thinking. The tattoo at your collar, American traditional, an eagle gone soft at the edges — that one comes loud: a tattoo parlor in Hialeah at twenty, his first paycheck as a rookie, proud of it in a way he'd never say out loud, Dana tracing it now sometimes at night, half-asleep. The patrol belt isn't on him here, but the memory of its weight is, dusk light, leaning on the hood of a cruiser, radio traffic like weather. And under everything, quieter, the doctor's voice from a checkup six months back, a word like *cardiac*, a follow-up he keeps meaning to schedule and hasn't.

You look at your hands — his hands, bitten nails, sweat drying at the wrist, a wedding-adjacent tan line where a ring isn't because he never married her — turning them slow like they might tell you something they haven't already, and you say, to nobody, to the empty rack, to the bottle sweating on the floor:

"Two more."

Nobody hears the joke in it. You don't know yet how long you'll want to.