Marcus Theriault

The break room smells like burnt coffee and the tail end of somebody's cigarette break, and you are sitting on a rolled stool with Cole Fontenot's skinny knees jackknifed under a counter too low for anybody's comfort, twenty-four years old and a nurse and one minute into being him, and already you are bored of it. That is the truth of it, plain and a little embarrassing: you spun the wheel a hundred and eighty-four times to feel a body arrive around you like a coat dropped from the sky, and this one landed soft. No fight in his hands, no ache worth naming, a face you already know is unremarkable under these lights. You gave him sixty seconds. That is more chance than you gave the one before him. Your thumb — his thumb, doesn't matter, never matters for long — finds the phone in your scrub pocket, the site loads before you've decided anything, and the wheel is already spinning under your finger when you stop thinking of a reason.

Two two thousand miles north and three hours later in the day, a bar drops two inches wider in your grip than it's been all year, and you are grinding out a rep that should have ended a set ago.

Your knuckles are chalked. Your forearms are shaking in a way that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with a man's shoulders that have done this a thousand times, and for one full second before anything else arrives you are just weight and breath and the specific, total strain of a body that lifts because lifting is the only vanity it lets itself have. The bar goes back on the rack. Your face — his face — does not do what a last rep's face does. No grimace. No relief. Just stillness, like a machine between cycles.

Then the bar under your palms gives you his hands gripping it a thousand other times, chalk dust and cold steel and the particular ache low in the back that means he's forty now, not thirty, and the knees know it before he does most mornings. A whole gym rises up sideways — Tuesdays and Thursdays, the same three guys who nod instead of talk, the mirror he doesn't look at except to check his form. The water bottle sweating on the floor by his foot brings up a kitchen counter, his wife's voice asking if he's eating enough vegetables, and the small laugh he gives every time because she has asked him that for eleven years and will ask him for eleven more.

His shirt is at the gym in a duffel, not on him yet, but the memory of putting it on this morning comes anyway, hanging off the plaid flannel he wore into the shop earlier — sleeve by sleeve, the top button that never quite lines up right, the smell of cedar shim stock and old refrigerant clinging to the collar no matter how many times it's washed. He'd stood in the bedroom doorway buttoning it while his daughter ate cereal at the counter below and didn't look up, and he'd felt, the way he feels most mornings, like a man standing exactly where he is supposed to be standing.

The wedding band on his left hand, plain and a little loose these days, gives you a beach in October, her hand cold in his, the tide doing what it does. It gives you the walk-in cooler at the store, fogging open onto a room of boxes, and the particular satisfaction of a compressor that finally kicks on right. It gives you thirteen years of a house gone silver-shingled against the weather, lobster traps stacked by the door he keeps meaning to either use or throw out, and never does either. It gives you gum, a fresh piece going in without him noticing his own hand reaching for the pack, an old habit standing in for the cigarette he only lets himself have with a drink at the end of a day like this one.

None of it is dramatic. None of it needs to be. It is a whole ordinary decent life, sitting in his hands and his back and the mole high on his cheek that he has stopped seeing in mirrors, and you take all of it in the space of a breath that is his and is now, also, yours.

You set the bar down for real this time. You look at your hands — his hands, broad, a little raw at the knuckles, the ring catching gym light — and turn them over once, like you're checking them for a warranty.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to no one, in his voice, and you don't yet know if that's for the rep or for something else entirely.