Trevor Angstadt

Ramón's shift ended forty minutes ago and his knees still know it, that court reporter ache that lives in the joints now instead of just the fingers. You have had him less than a minute — bald head, brown eyes, a beauty mark you keep catching in the bathroom mirror like it belongs to someone else, because it does — and already the boredom is a physical thing, a low hum under the sternum. Sixty-two years old and the body wants to sit down and the wanting is not yours, it came stapled to him, and you are so tired of inheriting other men's tiredness that your thumb is already on the little laptop trackpad before you have decided anything. The wheel loads. You don't even hesitate over the spin button. That is the tell, if anyone were watching: not despair, not hunger, just the flat click of a man reaching for the next thing because the thing in his hand has gone quiet on him.

The car drifts a foot toward the line and pulls itself straight, and you are the one pulling it.

Both hands leave the wheel and come back lower, wider, wrong for a second and then not. The turn signal ticks for an exit three miles early and nobody behind these eyes told it to. Dash glow lies along knuckles that are not the knuckles you had ninety seconds ago — longer, paler, a faint ridge of callus at the first joint of the right index finger that means nothing to you yet.

The steering wheel is leather gone slightly tacky with a summer of hands, and it gives you the first flash before you've even registered you're braking for the light at the bottom of the ramp: him at sixteen, a different car, his father's hand coming down flat on this same spot of dash saying *ten and two, always ten and two*, a lesson that outlived the father by a decade and never once got mentioned at Thanksgiving. The seatbelt cuts low across a stomach that carries more than it used to and less strength than it looks like it should — skinny fat, the kind of build that reads thin in a coat and soft the moment the coat comes off. Six foot two of a frame he has stopped fighting.

The white coat isn't on him now, it's home, but your hands remember the weight of it anyway through the cotton of what he's wearing tonight, because the coat and this shirt got put on the same body in the same mirror ten hours ago. Sleeve first, left arm into a light blue shirt still warm from the dryer, second button always sticking, a habit of doing the tie in four wraps not three because three came out crooked once in front of a patient and he never forgave the mirror for it. Standing at the counter afterward — the flash comes up through the steering wheel like heat off asphalt — the wall of amber bottles at his back catching the window light, and a woman he's counseled through the same three medications for two years asking after his kids like she's known them, and him smiling with the dimples that never fully go away, not even now, not even mid-yawn at the end of a nine-hour shift, they just deepen.

The two kids are in there, in the give of the seat, the exact recline he never adjusts because his daughter reset it to build a fort in it and he liked it too much to move back. His girlfriend's voice is folded into the radio dial, a station she picked and he never changed, some pop thing that isn't his but is hers and by now might as well be. There's a version of an ex-girlfriend living in the cupholder, a chapstick that used to be hers that he never threw out and never mentions and doesn't examine too closely why. None of it costs him anything to remember because none of it is yours to feel guilty about — it comes through his hands, through the wheel, sleeve by sleeve, and it arrives the way a smell arrives, sudden and whole and gone.

His body is thirty-four and tells you so in small ways — a lower back that's fine sitting, worse standing too long at the counter, hands that know without being told how to count thirty tablets by eye and feel wrong if they're off by one. Right now those hands are drumming, without you, against the wheel at a red light that hasn't turned yet, the habit older than any memory attached to it, older than the kids, older than the girlfriend, maybe older than the ex. Money means nothing physical about him — no jewelry, no marks, nothing he'd point to — but it's there in the unhurried way he sits at a light three miles from a house he owns outright, a man who has never once had to drink to get through a Monday and never wanted a cigarette to help him do it either.

The light goes green. Nobody behind you honks because nobody needed to.

You look down at the hands on the wheel — wrong hands, new hands, a beauty mark gone, the ache in the knees gone with it, everything traded — and you turn the right one over slowly like you're checking it for a wound that isn't there. The dimples show even now, even doing nothing, an old carved-in kindness on a face that has no idea whose kindness it currently is.

"Three miles early," you say, out loud, to the empty car, and take the wrong exit anyway.