Otis Redding pops up on her Spotify as she’s driving home from dropping her daughter at school. So of course she starts thinking about T, the NYC performance artist who was artist-in-residence decades before at a college where she and her husband E—then boyfriend—were newly lecturers. Standing near the stereo, their bodies close, they’d overheard T overheatedly telling J, an assistant professor, that Otis Redding was far superior to the blatantly appropriating Allman Brothers. Being an art department party in the early 2000’s, they were all drunk and loose. She winces now recalling how she’d peeled, “Oh, I love Otis Redding!” How scornfully T had regarded her. His silence is pregnant with subtext. He’d quizzed her on her favorite Otis song. Put her on the spot. She feels again her flush of pleasure at his surprise—she hadn’t said Dock of the Bay or Stand by Me—even then she’d understood that much. He’d turned to the stereo and put on the song she named. Another test. She feels it still. The rest of the night is lost to her now, but she sees as if through blurry film her own eyes half close, head tilting back, hips stilled to move as the song slow builds, lips parting for Otis’s booming croon. They were all watching her, she knew it too, E, that letch J, and even T. Inside the time capsule of her car, she’s awash in surrender to something infinitely powerful and yet tender.