Todd Warkentin

Raymond's knees ache on the good chair, the recliner with the crocheted throw his daughter-in-law made, and that's reason enough right there — sixty-four years old, freckled hands, a body that took twelve hours and seventeen minutes to teach you every single thing wrong with it. The blood sugar. The knee that pops going down stairs. You have been an old man on a Saturday in Pittsburgh since yesterday evening, and it has been long enough. Not bad. Just done. You open the laptop on Raymond's TV tray, and the site loads the way it always loads, patient, the wheel already spinning lazy behind the paywall like it's been waiting on you specifically. You don't think about the man underneath. You never really do. You pay, and Raymond's finger — you're still noticing it's Raymond's finger, spotted, second knuckle swollen — taps the wheel, and it goes.

The bar is in your hands two inches wider than grip you've used all year, and your arms are already committed to the press before you have any right to know that. Chalk dust and cold knurled steel. A body under you that answers instantly — younger, tighter, forty-nine and still built like something with a job to do — locks out the rep on its own momentum, the way muscle does when it hasn't been told yet that the man running it changed. Fluorescent light overhead, humming. Somewhere behind you, weight plates clank in another rack. You are sitting up into it before you've decided to, breath punching out through teeth that aren't gritted the way a last rep grits them, because nothing back here yet knows this is a last rep.

The bench slats are warm from him already, and that's the first thing that comes: an hour of him on this exact bench, four sets in, counting under his breath, some private arithmetic about a chest day he does every Tuesday and Saturday, rain or not, dust storm or not. Then the shirt — no, no shirt, just the t-shirt he stripped off two sets back, and it's not on him but it's in the gym bag six feet away and somehow that's close enough, and it gives you a Tuesday in March, him pulling it over his head in a kitchen that smells like coffee gone cold, a woman's voice from the other room saying something about her sister's wedding, easy, unbothered, a girlfriend's voice, warm the way six months in is warm. Sharon. Not the ex. The ex is a name that comes up sideways, from the wedding ring he doesn't wear anymore but the tan line still ghosts on, faint after two years — Denise, and there's a whole marriage folded into that one word, not a bad one, just one that ran out of road, and some Sunday phone calls that still happen sometimes and mean something neither of them says out loud.

The water bottle sweats against your palm and it's cold and it's his hand's memory more than yours, a thousand identical bottles, a thousand lots at dusk leaning on the hood of a cruiser watching wheat stubble go gold then grey, radio murmuring nothing much, a county with more sky than people in it. The badge on the shirt hanging in his locker two rooms over gives you fourteen years of it in a rush — nothing dramatic, no gunfights, just a wedding of an interstate stop-turned-flat-tire-fix, a bad wreck out on 83 he still doesn't talk about, the particular quiet of driving home alone past midnight with the windows down because Kansas in September doesn't need air conditioning. Your arms remember the ink going in — the eagle, the star, the banner that says a name that isn't Sharon's and isn't Denise's, his mother's, dead nine years now, a Tuesday he doesn't observe on any calendar but his skin does.

Your fingernails are bitten down close, and you feel that too, an old habit that outlived the drinking he quit at thirty-one without a program, just stopped, one hangover too many measured against a badge he didn't want to lose. Spiritual, he'd say if you asked him, not religious, something about how the wheat looks at first light that he's never bothered to put a name to. High blood pressure sits in him like weather, a pill every morning with the coffee, a doctor's voice he mostly ignores. The body under all of it is good — worn right, forty-nine wearing like thirty-nine except for the low back on cold mornings, strong through the chest and shoulders in a way that came from exactly this bench, exactly this bar, exactly this ordinary Saturday he has had a hundred times and will not have again.

You set the bar down. Your hands are shaking slightly, not from the lift.

You look at them — his hands, blunt and nail-bitten and inked at the wrist — and turn them over once in the gym's bad light, and somewhere behind your eyes Raymond's recliner is still running the TV nobody's watching in a house eight hundred miles and one whole life away.

"Forty," you say, out loud, to no one, to the empty rack, and you don't know yet if you mean the spins or something else.