Wendell Hatfield

You are leaving Octavio Benítez because of the leg. Not the pain; he had made a peace with that. It was the stairs at his daughter's school, the ones he walked past for fifty-six years of somebody's life, and the way the socket rubbed raw while he smiled at a board of directors. Less than a minute in him, and you already knew the whole day was a negotiation with a limb you did not choose. Atlanta mid-morning, glass on every side, and you thought: something that just moves. Then you pressed the button.

The wheel spins and lands.

You are sitting. A bench under a rack of coats, forearms on your knees, and the cold sweat of a bottle against your ankle. Your breath is still going out through your teeth, and you stop it. The bar is in front of you suddenly, and your hands are on it two inches wider than they have been all year. You lift.

The knurling bites into calluses that were already there. A flash comes through the steel: a pallet jack, a loading dock, a boss saying *you're good with the boxes, Wendell.* The shame in it is quiet and old.

Your shirt, the plaid flannel, is soft at the elbows. It gives you a morning: a girlfriend's back turned in a dim kitchen, the coffee he never drinks past the first sip, his thumbs working each button from the bottom up because the top one sticks. He tugged the cuffs twice. He did not say anything, and the not-saying sat in his chest all the way to the car.

The jeans have gone stiff at the knee. Under your feet the concrete is cold through worn canvas soles, and the cold gives you a creek: a cable footbridge, brown water, green shade, a woman who is not the girlfriend laughing on the planks, the bridge swaying, his own laugh showing gold in his mouth. She is the ex, and she still matters. He walks there on bad days and doesn't tell anyone.

Your shoulders burn, honest and warm. Forty-three years sit in the lower back like a held breath. Your heart is slow and strong. You grind the rep up, slow, and your face does none of what a last rep does, because you are somewhere else and so is he.

You rack the bar. The steel rings.

You look at your hands: square, scuffed, a stranger's, turning over under the lights. You lift your eyes and your tongue finds the gold tooth.

"Huh," you say, and it glints. "That one works."

Somewhere under your ribs the wanting is already asleep, and you do not know how long it stays that way.