Yusuf Haddad

Gary Petrosian's kitchen smells like the inside of a microwave, and you've been standing in it for three minutes deciding you don't want it. Fifty-six years old, gray moustache, a beauty mark you keep catching in the reflection of the toaster like it belongs to someone else — because it does. The maintenance closet at the apartment complex is calling your name in an hour, a leaking union joint under Building C that some other tenant will complain about tomorrow whether or not you're the one who's still here to fix it. You didn't spin for this. You spun for the last one, and the one before that, and somewhere around number forty you stopped being able to say why you keep doing it except that the wanting always comes back before the guilt does. Gary's got a bad knee and a decent pension and absolutely nothing left that surprises you. So you open the laptop on his counter, the site already bookmarked under a name that means nothing to anyone else, and you spin.

The wheel doesn't take you anywhere. It takes you into somewhere.

Ten and two. Dark highway, dash light green on knuckles that are not Gary's soft spotted ones — these are younger, wider, a callus riding the base of each finger like a second knuckle. The car is already drifting, a slow foot toward the centerline, and you feel it correct itself before you've decided to correct it, both hands coming off the wheel and back down lower, wider, easier, the way a body sits when it has driven this road four hundred times without thinking about it. The blinker clicks on. Left. For an exit that means nothing to you yet.

The shirt is what opens first — plaid, soft through a thousand washes, snug over shoulders built by a shovel rather than a gym, and it comes with the smell of his own sweat gone cool and a slap of memory: this morning, pulling it off a hanger in a bedroom with blackout curtains because he sleeps late on Sundays and works every other day like clockwork, threading his right arm in first out of habit, always the right, his mother taught him that as a boy getting ready for school in another kitchen that smelled like cardamom and diesel from his father's shop below. Yusuf. The name arrives with the shirt, plain and whole, the way his own name always arrives to a man, without ceremony.

The wheel under his palms brings the rest in waves. Six years of laborer's hands — rebar tie wire biting grooves into his fingers before the calluses grew thick enough to stop it, the shock of a jackhammer traveling up through wrists into a jaw he didn't know could ache, the particular ache low in his spine at the end of a pour that no stretching ever quite got out. He is twenty-two and his back already keeps a ledger. But he is strong in the specific, uncomplicated way of a man who has spent six years lifting: the forearms dense, the palms permanently rough, a body that does the math on a wheelbarrow's load before the mind gets involved.

The seatbelt against his chest gives him the site — the trench this afternoon, spoil piled red-brown beside the mini excavator, the operator, Danny, hollering something about the sewer lateral being two inches off plan, and Yusuf standing in the cut up to his thighs with a shovel, sweat soaking through the yellow shirt by ten a.m., the sun doing what Texas suns do to a man in a hard hat. He likes the work more than he'd admit to his mother, who wanted something with air conditioning for him. There's a satisfaction in a trench cut clean and true that a desk never gave anyone.

The dash glow gives him the drive home — every evening, the same three miles, the radio low, the vape in the cupholder that he'll reach for the second he's parked because you can't hit it and steer, not really, not safely, though he does it anyway sometimes at red lights. Nicotine is the one vice he lets himself name; the beer he has maybe six times a year, at a cousin's wedding, at somebody's Fourth of July, never more than two.

And under his fingers, faint, worn into the wheel's leather in a groove his own grip made: her. Not a memory that comes all at once but in pieces, the way a bruise announces itself when you press it. A year with a woman named Priya who left for Houston for a job that was better than anything he could offer her here, and who still texts him sometimes on his birthday, and who he still, if he is honest with the dark road and no one else, checks the read receipts for. He does not think about her every day. He thinks about her most days. There is no ring, no apartment they almost shared, nothing anyone else would call a wound — just an ordinary door that closed on an ordinary Tuesday and never opened again, and a man who still, without noticing he's doing it, runs a hand over his own scalp when her name comes up in his head, like he's checking that he's still there.

You feel all twenty-two years of him settle into the seat — younger flesh than you've worn in months, no ache in the knee, a jaw set with a beard you didn't grow and didn't earn, a body that could work another eight hours if someone asked it to. It is, in its plain way, the best body you've been given in a long time. Ordinary, the site would call it. Comfortable, not rich. A man nobody's looking for, on a road nobody's watching.

You bring both hands up off the wheel, into the dash light, and turn them over one at a time. Rough palms. A groove of callus at the base of each finger. Somebody else's hands, doing exactly what they always do, running themselves once over a scalp gone unfamiliar under them.

"Okay," you say, to the empty cab, in a voice that isn't yours and wasn't his either, not anymore. "Okay."

The blinker keeps ticking for the wrong exit, patient, waiting to find out where you're going now.