Mateo Rangel

Dale Pruneda's hands smell like cut grass and diesel, and they have been Dale's hands for exactly five minutes, and already that is too long. You are standing in his trailer's side yard in the flat Las Vegas afternoon, gray coming in thick at the temples, blue eyes watching a hose drip into a bucket, and you understand with total clarity that this body is correct in every way and that correctness itself is the problem. Dale is sixty-four and built like a door and his back does not hurt yet today. You spun for *more*, and the wheel gave you *competent*, and competent, it turns out, is boring inside five minutes flat. There's a phone in the truck with the site still open on it, the wheel still spinning lazy behind the glass from last time, and you don't even walk to get it so much as you find yourself already reaching, Dale's thick fingers fumbling his own phone like it belongs to someone else — which, you suppose, it does now. You tap it before you can call it a mistake.

The gym noise arrives before the gym does: plates clacking somewhere, a blower fan, a voice two racks over counting someone else's set. You are sitting. You are smaller than you were a half-second ago, compact, a weight in the shoulders that did not used to be there, forearms on your knees, and your hands are mid-motion, re-gripping chalk that isn't there, two inches wider on the bar than any grip you've used all year, except you haven't used any grip, ever, in your life, and the body under you does not care what you know. It stands you up off the bench on its own instinct and walks you under the rack before your mind has finished arriving. A water bottle, sweating, rocks on the rubber floor by your foot. You grind the reps out slow, and your face — his face — does none of what a last rep's face does. It just works.

It is the beard that opens first, the itch of it against the collar when you duck your chin to breathe, and with the itch comes an entire morning: an electric trimmer buzzing in a bathroom mirror in Garden City, a woman's voice down the hall saying *you're going to be late again*, fond, not really a complaint, and the plaid shirt — no, not this shirt, that was yesterday's, but the hands remember buttoning it the same, bottom button first, always, a thing his mother taught him that his wife has never once commented on. The gym shirt against your back now is damp through already, and it gives you less than cloth usually does, just salt and a half-year-old memory of a 5k he ran with his daughter, her hand slapping his sweaty back at the finish line, *Dad you're so slow*, laughing.

The bar is the real key. Cold knurled steel, and it floods you: twenty years of a hardware aisle and a grocery aisle and finally this store, *his* store, keys that live on his belt that aren't on him here but whose weight he still half-feels missing at his hip. Breaking down pallets before opening, box cutter flashing, the particular ache of a Thursday that is always the longest day of his week for no reason he's ever figured out. A wife — Priscilla — asleep already most likely, this hour, this far east, because this hour here is an hour later there, and he does these sets after close because it is the only hour that is only his. An ex-wife's voice on the phone last week, civil now in a way it took six years to get to, talking about their daughter's recital. The daughter herself, nine, a gap in her front teeth, a drawing of a thunderhead stuck to his locker because she said the sky at home looked like that the day she drew it and she was right, it does, right now, outside the gym's one window, black and stacking and going the color of a bruise.

His thumbnail is bitten to the quick on the left hand, has been since he was a kid, and the wedding band on that hand is warm from his own skin, not yours, not anymore quite yours to say. The bar comes down. He doesn't rack it clean — some tiny flinch three reps back — and the body corrects for it without asking you, muscle doing math you didn't do.

You set the bar down. You bring your hands up in front of your face the way he never does, turning them like you've never seen hands bite their own nails, like you don't recognize the thin pale line through one eyebrow you can't even see but can feel, old and smooth under your own fingertip when it drifts there without meaning to.

You look up into the gym's flat light, into nothing in particular, and you say, "Okay. Okay, let's see how long."