Tony Ferrante

You are leaving Adrian Mejía, and you are leaving him because of the stairs. Six minutes in him, and the store keys already feel like a leash. Mid-morning in Denver, the mall is empty and the lights hum. You stand folding a display of cotton shirts nobody wants, and you realize that at five-eight you cannot reach the top shelf without the stool, and the stool is the first thing anyone remembers about you. You wanted to be looked at when you walked in. Nobody looks. The manager calls you "bud." You put the shirt down and open the page with the wheel on it. Your thumb knows the way by now. It is the 1242nd time, and you have stopped pretending it is curiosity.

The wheel clicks and slows. In Miami it is the middle of the day, and a man is sitting under a rack, tired.

Then you are the weight on the bench.

Your forearms are on your knees. The bench slat is hard under your thighs. A bottle sweats on the floor by your shoe; you feel the cold of it in the air before you see it. Your breath has been blowing through your teeth, and now it stops. You stand. Your hands go to the bar two inches wider than they have gone all year, and the knurling bites. You grind out the reps slow, and your face does none of what a last rep does.

The shirt is gray and tight across your shoulders, and it opens first. A Tuesday morning: the closet, the hanger, his wife's hand on his back as she passes in the hall, saying you'll be late, and he is not late, he works nights, he is never late. A kind of tenderness comes with it, plain as bread. The jeans give you the other pocket: the folded receipt, a pharmacy, a crib mattress. One child. A daughter, and the feeling arrives before the face does, a pressure behind the sternum that has nothing to do with the weights.

The bar is cold, and under it a year opens. A rope at one in the morning, neon on wet tile outside the club, a hundred drunk strangers' names that he never kept. He has never struck anyone he did not have to. He is proud of that and tells no one. He quit drinking because a man at the rope once looked at him and said *you look tired*, and it was true. There is money put away, not much, a number he checks the way other men check a pulse. The pompadour takes a minute every morning; he does it for himself, the one vanity.

Your knuckles crack without your asking, one by one, and the sound is his, soothing, a habit older than the marriage. Your shoulders burn. Your quads are strong, your lower back is faintly sore, twenty-eight years old and everything still answers. The ring sits on your left hand, plain and warm.

You lower the bar to the rack and turn your hands over. The band catches the light. You lift your eyes.

"Huh," you say, in his low voice. "Okay. You're mine."

And already, somewhere under the breath, the wheel hums, patient, asking how long.