Cody Brandsetter

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Gary Sechlin's hands are shaking before you even get to the site, and that's the thing you notice first, standing in his kitchen in the gray before-light, because Gary's hands have shaken every morning for a week and you're tired of it. Fifty-five years old, a glazier's hands, nicked up along the knuckles from thirty years of glass, and this morning they won't hold still on the counter's edge. You made him coffee he isn't going to want. You've been him less than a day and already you know what the rest of it looks like: a knee that clicks going down stairs, a phone full of a daughter who doesn't call back, a body that did its work already and is coasting now on habit and ibuprofen. It isn't unbearable. It's just used up. You didn't spin twenty-five times to end up drinking decaf in Queens at dawn feeling your own borrowed pulse skip.

So you open the laptop on his kitchen table, the wheel already loaded from last night, and you pay again, and you spin, not deciding so much as reaching for the thing that's always there to reach for.

The bar is in your hands before you know they're your hands — wide, wider than you've set it all year, the knurling biting cold into two new palms — and your back is against a bench pad that smells like somebody else's sweat, and your knees are bent to a squat that hasn't happened yet, thighs screaming with a burn that started in a life you didn't live. Fluorescent light too bright and too close overhead. A water bottle, sweating, somewhere below and to the left, out of sight. The last exhale you meant to blow through your teeth stops in your throat unfinished, and you grind down into the rep anyway, slow, control that isn't panic, because the muscles already know how to do this and you are only riding along behind the eyes for now.

The shirt is what gets you first — gray cotton, damp, pasted to a broad back — and it comes with the memory of pulling it on this morning, in a room down the hall from a mother who doesn't wake until seven, one arm through the sleeve and the sleeve catching on the sleeve of ink underneath: script letters, a name, a date, ARTHUR JAMES, EST. 1996, the grandfather who taught him to drive a stick shift in a hayfield and died before Cody ever thanked him for it properly. The name on the arm isn't his own and that's the point — a debt worn permanent, the kind you get before you're old enough to know if you'll regret it, and he never has.

You are standing in his weight now, all of it — six-five, heavy through the shoulders and gut both, the particular tiredness of a body that unloads couches and dressers off a truck all day and then, instead of resting, comes here, to a gym with one working AC unit, at an hour that would be night to any normal man because his shift starts at four in the morning loading the truck before the heat comes up. His feet, in boots he didn't bother to trade for sneakers, know the floor of this place without looking. His forearms, when they were resting on his knees a minute ago, carried the ghost of a couch's weight, a strap's bite, a woman's voice from three weeks back saying she needed space in that flat, done-with-it tone, and under that a whole year of her — a girl named Brianne who liked his dimples more than she liked anything else about him and told him so more than once, not unkindly, just honestly, the last week before she left for a job in Columbus and didn't ask him to follow. He hasn't told anyone at the shop. He vapes about it in the truck at lunch, watching the closed diner across the street with its dead sign, and that's as far as it goes.

His faith comes through too, quieter — a church three blocks from the one stoplight, a pastor who knows his name, a version of Wednesday night he sometimes makes it to and sometimes doesn't, guilt either way, mild and familiar as the vape in his pocket.

The belt is worn soft in one spot from being unbuckled the same way every night. The dimples are there even now, mid-rep, doing nothing, showing anyway, an accident of his face that has gotten him further with strangers than he's ever tried to use it for.

You finish the rep. The bar goes back into the rack with a sound that rings in a chest twice the size you're used to.

You look down. Your hands — his hands, blunt-nailed, a healing scrape across one wrist from a stair rail at a job Tuesday — turn over in the gym light like you're checking they're real, and for a second the sleeve of script catches your eye, ARTHUR JAMES, a stranger's grandfather, already yours to carry now and mean nothing by.

You say, out loud, to no one, in a voice pitched low and a little rough with the last set: "One more."

You don't know yet if you mean the rep.