Trent Ostergaard

You are standing at the front of a classroom, a marker capping itself in your hand, and it is the smell of dry-erase ink that decides you. Craig Holloway's hand. Craig Holloway's arthritis, faint but there, a small bright ache in the knuckle where the ring used to sit before the divorce. Fifty-nine years of it, and less than a minute of it belonging to you, and already you know: not this one. Not the whiteboard, not the freckled forearm, not the smell of a lecture hall that has been the same smell since 1994. You did not spin six hundred and forty-three times to end up teaching. There is a particular flatness that comes over a body when it was never going to be exciting no matter who drives it, and you feel that flatness now like a held breath, and you want out of it the way you'd want out of a coat that fits someone else's shoulders exactly and yours not at all. You do not finish the thought. You are already reaching for the phone in Craig's blazer, already finding the site, already spinning, because the wanting doesn't announce itself, it just arrives, sudden and total, the way it always does, and you go.

The wheel gives you weight first. A gut pushing gently at overall straps. Both hands coming off a steering wheel and dropping low and wide onto denim knees, like they've done this a thousand times and know exactly where to land. Dash light green on knuckles that are thicker than Craig's, younger, a wedding-less ring finger with a pale ghost-band where something used to sit. The turn signal is already clicking — tick, tick — for an exit that is not this man's exit, and you don't correct it, because you don't know yet that it's wrong. You only know: highway, dark, sagebrush smell bleeding in through a cracked window, and a body built low and solid like a stove, holding heat.

The shirt is what opens first. Flannel, soft at the elbows from wear, and touching it gives you a version of this morning that isn't yours: standing in a single-wide with the light coming up gray behind the blinds, second cup of coffee gone cold on the counter, pulling this exact shirt off a hook by the door because the good one, the one Denise likes, is still damp from the wash. Sleeve by sleeve. Left arm first, always left arm first, some habit from a body that broke that arm at nineteen falling off a ladder and never trusted it fully again. The fabric drags over the anchor tattoo on the forearm — cheap, faded, done at twenty-two in Reno with a buddy who is dead now, car wreck, and there's a flicker of that grief, old and worn smooth like a stone in a pocket. The swallow on the other arm came later, after the first kid. The eagle after the second. Each one bought with money that should've gone somewhere else, and he knows it, and he doesn't regret it, both at once.

The wheel under your palms brings the drive itself — not this drive, all of them, every version of this same three miles home stacked on top of each other like paint on a wall that's been redone too many times. The trailer at the end of it, blocks and skirting and a rope-light someone strung along the porch rail for no reason anyone remembers. Two kids' voices behind that door, one of them probably already asleep, the older one probably not. Denise's laugh through a screen door on a night that wasn't this one. None of it dramatic. All of it his.

Your feet find the truck's floor mats and from there comes the job — knees on drop cloths, the particular burn in the lower back from bending at a baseboard for six hours, the smell of latex paint that never fully leaves the cuticles no matter how much Lava soap gets worked into them. Blue tape peeled up at the end of a day, satisfying as anything, a clean line revealed under it like a magic trick you never get tired of. This body knows how to cut a corner without the tape at all, wrist locked, brush angled, twenty-five years old and already better at this than men twice his age, and it is the one thing that feels like his own instead of something that happened to him.

The mole comes to you last, strange way, a fingertip grazing it by accident against the doorframe reaching for the belt — high on the cheek, and every photo he's ever hated of himself has been because of the way the flash catches it, and every photo Denise loves has been for the same reason.

Nicotine wants a cigarette that isn't there, a phantom itch at the back of the throat, four days quit and lying to himself about how easy it is. The dash clock would say late morning if he ever looked at it, but there's no clock in this beat, only a highway that should be dark and the strange fact underneath it, unexamined by him and half-noticed by you: the shadows through the windshield are hard-edged and blue, sagebrush lit low and gold, and it is not night here at all — somewhere behind you, in a classroom, it had been the middle of a Monday, and here it is morning stretched thin over a road he's driven a thousand times, going nowhere near a highway, an evening drive happening in daylight for reasons that belong to no one but the wheel.

You look down. The hands on your knees are wide, blunt-fingered, paint ground into the nail beds no soap has ever fully lifted, a thin gold band on the left hand that isn't a wedding ring — a promise, maybe, or a mother's, you don't know yet, you'll learn it later or you won't. The turn signal keeps ticking for the wrong exit. You lift your eyes to the windshield, to the two miles of empty road left in a drive that was never really this drive at all, and you say it out loud, to no one, in his voice, thick with a life you're only just starting to borrow:

"Okay. Okay — who are you."