Colby Wetherell

The pharmacy smells like it always smells, alcohol and cardboard and the particular staleness of a building with no windows worth opening, and Wilbur Standingdeer's knee aches the way it has ached every Monday since the leg went, phantom and real at once, a joint that isn't there complaining about weather that hasn't come yet. You have been him fifty-one seconds. Fifty-one seconds is long enough to know you don't want it — the counting trays, the customer at the window asking about a generic, the particular tiredness in a chest that's carried sixty-five years of shift work and grief you haven't even met yet, only felt the weight of, hanging off him like a coat that's too heavy for the hook. You did not spin for boredom this time, not exactly. You spun because his hip send a bolt up through where the leg isn't, and you thought: not this one, not today, not an old man's Monday in a dispensary with the fluorescent light buzzing like a trapped fly. You want out of him before he even has a name for what he's feeling. You want, plainly, to be young again, and you have the money in your account — or his account, whichever way you want to think of the switch fee — to buy it outright. You go to the back room, sit at the terminal because your hands (his hands) already know the login, and you pull up vessel.cards on your break, and you spin.

The bar is under your palms and it is wider than it should be, your hands too far apart, some other man's habit setting the grip before you arrive to fill it, and the first thing you know is weight — a bar loaded heavier than Wilbur Standingdeer's whole ruined body ever moved — pressing down through shoulders that are not stooped, are not sixty-five, are wide and warm and slicked with a workout's worth of sweat. Legs under you that both exist. A rack around you, cold steel close on either side. You are mid-rep, thighs burning, and the breath that should be a hiss through gritted teeth doesn't come — you don't know yet how to make this face do that — so you just grind, slow, silent, the bar rising because his shoulders know how even though you don't.

The bar goes back on the rack with a clank that rings through your palms and up both arms, and that's the first thing that comes through — not a memory yet, just a fact his hands know: this weight, this exact grip, four times a week for three years, this rack in this gym off the coast road with the salt smell that gets into everything, the ropes and the tire and the guy who runs the place calling him "Cole" like it's short for something. Colby. Colby Wetherell. The name arrives like that, sideways, off the smell of chalk on his fingers.

You sit down on the bench under the rack — his body does it before you decide to, knees folding into the exact geometry they've used a thousand times — and the water bottle beside your foot on the floor, sweating onto the plywood, gives you the rest of the afternoon before this one: three sets already, the fourth just finished, a lull he was in the middle of enjoying two minutes ago, forearms on his knees, staring at nothing, thinking about nothing, which is rarer for him than it looks. There's a pill he takes most mornings, small and unremarkable, that makes the nothing possible — some years back the noise in his head got loud enough that he went and got help for it, quietly, the way you do in a town where everyone knows your truck. Nobody at the gym knows. His girlfriend knows. Her name comes in on the memory of the pill bottle, blue cap, on the bathroom counter of a house that is gray shingle gone the color of an oyster shell, and she is standing at the counter in a flannel too big for her that used to be his, laughing about something, and you feel what he feels about her, which is easy and warm and a little bit like relief, like a door you don't have to keep proving you can walk through.

There's an ex in there too, close enough behind the current one that touching the memory of her is like touching a bruise you keep forgetting is still tender — a girl from sophomore year who left for grad school in Boston and didn't ask him to follow, and some nights, not many, he still runs the tape of what he could have said differently, standing in the dooryard with the traps stacked up and the cold coming off the water. That ache is small and specific and entirely his, and you hold it for a second because it's the most honest thing you've found in him yet.

The shirt against your back — his back, wet through at the spine — gives you this morning: standing in the gray-shingled house before light, girlfriend still asleep, pulling this navy shirt over his head one arm at a time, the fabric smelling like the detergent she buys, stepping into these same shorts, lacing the same dark sneakers by the door while a lobster boat's engine coughs awake somewhere down the road. Ordinary. He does this every day of his life and it costs him nothing, and that ease is its own kind of wealth, separate from whatever's sitting in his accounts, more valuable than that, probably, though he's never once put it in those words.

You feel the mole on your cheekbone without looking, just a faint raised warmth under two fingers when you drag a hand down your own face, checking. Feel the curl of hair stuck damp to your forehead. Feel twenty-six years in a body that has never once had to think about a stair, a hip, a phantom ache — legs that just work, shoulders wide and thick with three years of Tuesdays and Thursdays like this one, a mouth that still has all its own teeth and a wad of tobacco tucked, right now, cold and forgotten, low against his gum.

You look at your hands — his hands, blond-haired knuckles, a rope-burn callus low on the palm, chalk dust ghosting the creases — turn them over once like you're checking they came back the right way, and you laugh, short, into the empty rack in front of you, water bottle sweating a ring into the plywood by your foot.

"One more set," you say, out loud, to nobody, in his voice, and reach for the bar again like you've got all the time this Monday can give you.