Dale Hutchings

The pins are in your mouth again, the way Marcus held them, the way you've held them for less than a minute now, and you hate it already.

You are kneeling at a hem, a customer's cuff between your fingers, a mirror throwing back a face that isn't the one you started this life with either — none of them ever are, not really, not after six hundred and forty-five men. Marcus Delgado's knees ache on this floor. Marcus Delgado's shop smells like steam and chalk and the particular El Paso noon that leaks in gold under the door. You spun into him less than a minute ago and already you know the whole shape of what's wrong: this is fine work, careful work, work you could do forever, and forever is the problem. Forever with pins in your mouth. You want the enormous ordinary weight of somebody else, is all — not out of any complaint against Marcus, who is by every measure a decent man to be, but because staying still has never once been what you spun for. You spit the pins into your palm, tell the customer you'll just be a moment, and go to the back room where the site sits open on a cracked phone screen, the wheel already spinning under your thumb before you've decided anything at all.

It lands.

You are gripping a bar.

Not standing — gripping, arms locked, the bar biting into your palms two inches wider than any set you've done all year, and your whole body is a stranger's furnace, heat coming off you in a wave, chest heaving through the bottom of a rep that should have ended a minute ago. Weight is different. Everything is different. You are enormous in a way Marcus never let you be, thighs like something poured, and the bar wants to come down and you will it up instead, grinding, some rack around you and fluorescent light flat and hard overhead, and a water bottle sweating somewhere below that isn't yours yet but will be the second your hands remember it.

You get the bar into the rack. It clatters home.

The gym noise arrives late — a plate dropped somewhere, a fan overhead ticking on its mount — and so does he.

It comes in through the bar first, the knurling still printed into your palms, and it comes as *effort*, as a man's private arithmetic: *one more, just get one more, Katya's making the lamb tonight and you don't skip today, not today, not the day before the follow-up.* Blood pressure. A doctor's flat voice from some appointment last spring, a pill bottle on the bathroom sink with his name typed small on the label — Hutchings, D. — and the small, stubborn refusal in him to let that be the whole story of his body. He works out because the pressure is bad and this is the one thing that helps that he can stand to do.

Then the shirt. You're not wearing it now, it's balled by his gym bag, but the memory of it comes anyway, looping backward the way his memories do, unbidden — a soft flannel, plaid, buttons done wrong once and redone, sleeves rolled to the forearm because the desert doesn't care what season the calendar says. This morning: Dale standing in the single-wide's narrow bathroom, comb dragged through wet dark hair into that same hard part he's worn since he was twenty-two, because his mother liked it that way once and some things just don't get renegotiated. Behind him through the thin wall, water running — his wife already up, already dressed, the smell of her coffee finding him before she does. He remembers his own hand going to the nightstand for the ring, sliding it on out of habit older than thought, and for a second, standing here in a gym forty minutes later, the ring on this hand is warm from that same skin, that same fidelity, plain gold worn thin at the band.

He works refrigeration. That comes through the ache in his shoulders, the specific ache of a man who spent yesterday elbow-deep in a walk-in cooler with the fog rolling out over him like something biblical, gauges in his fist, hoses looped over one shoulder yellow red blue, breath fogging worse than the coils. He likes the work. Likes it the way you like a thing that has never once asked you to explain yourself — a compressor is bad or it isn't, a line is holding pressure or it's bleeding out, and either way you find it and you fix it and you drive home in a truck that smells like Freon and dust with the radio on the Spanish station because the English ones out here are all static and rage.

Church comes through next, folded in with the rest — an icon on the dash of that truck, small and gold-foiled, his fingers finding the edge of it at every red light without thinking, the particular quiet of a liturgy he doesn't attend as often as he means to but that lives in him anyway like a second pulse. No children ever came, and there is a grief folded into that so old it doesn't announce itself anymore, just sits there the way the mountains sit outside the trailer window, always visible, never discussed.

There was a drink once, years back, that thinned out on its own into nothing, no story to it, just a slow drift away that neither of them ever marked with a date.

You feel all fifty-one years of him now in the backs of your knees, in a lower back that has opinions about mornings, in hands that know a torque wrench and a comb and his wife's shoulder blade under a nightgown all with the same unhesitating competence. Heavy, solid, built like something meant to stand in weather. Good strength, tired strength, a man who trusts his body right up until the moment the doctor tells him not to.

You let go of the bar rack and look down at your own hands — his hands — knuckles thick, a callus riding the base of each finger, the wedding band catching the gym's cheap light.

You turn them over once, like you're checking they're real.

Then you lift your eyes to the mirror across the room, chest still working, and you say, out loud, to no one:

"Okay. Two more sets."