Wade Lundgren

You are Terrence Boyd, and you have been him for five minutes, standing in a dark kitchen in Ohio with a cold glass of water you haven't drunk. His knees are good. His belly is warm and heavy and sure of itself. His beard prickles when you set your jaw. You like him, and that is not the problem.

The problem is the shift whistle. It is in his ears even at this hour, a sound his body flinches at, and under it a long smell of machine oil that has soaked into the cuticles of his hands. You went to the site wanting something. You can't say what. You only know the wanting came back the second you saw the house asleep around you, everyone safe and breathing, and nobody in it who was yours.

You press the button. The wheel turns.

Then the weight changes, with no travel and no warning. You are face-down. Cotton is damp against your cheek. Your right arm hangs off the mattress, the knuckles brushing carpet, and a streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheet like a blade. Your breath is ragged, then it is even. Your arm draws itself up. You roll onto your back and your hands fold on your chest, a way he has never once slept.

The sheet under your palm is worn thin, and it gives you something unbidden. Her side of the bed, a Saturday, her laughing into the pillow because he snores and denies it. The feeling is ease, and under the ease a dull ache he never says aloud: three nights a week he is not here.

The black shirt you sleep in is soft from a thousand washes. Through the cotton comes a morning, years back, a church parking lot, his thumbs working the knot of a tie for a baby's christening, hands shaking, and the pride of it sitting in his throat like a swallowed stone.

The ring is cool on your finger. When you turn it, he is on a gravel road at dusk, a water tower going orange on the horizon. He is twenty-six, a girl in the passenger seat who is not his wife, and he is saying goodbye to her through a rolled-down window. Even now it is the one thing he keeps in a locked room. It is not guilt exactly. It is a door he is glad he closed.

Your fingers are drumming on your breastbone. You didn't tell them to. They are counting something, a road, a rhythm from the cab, the tap of a long haul with the radio off.

His back aches in the low left place from a thousand hours of seat. His shoulders are strong. The room smells of dust, a fan, and the sour tang of whatever he drank two nights ago, his one big night. Somewhere under it all he is praying, in his body's habit, a short rough thing he said every night, and your lips almost shape it.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. The plain band. The thick fingers. They are not yours, and they are yours. You turn them over, slowly, and lift your eyes.

"Hello, Wade," you say, low, in his voice.

How long, you wonder. The wanting is quiet now. You wait to hear when it comes back.