“Okay. I’m going to take a shower then.”
He got up and went upstairs and I heard the bedroom door close. I sat there on his couch, and didn’t move. I’d reached for the yards of grass between him and the grave he wouldn’t go to. And he’d done to me exactly what he did to it. He’d stood at the edge, and he’d stayed by the car.
34/
heart problems
julian
On Tuesdays,Alyssa lifted with me in the home gym at my house on Belmead. She’d signed up for a marathon in the spring, and I created a strength program for her on top of her running routine. This particular Tuesday she had her form wrong on the deadlifts. Not by much, but her shoulders rolled forward at the top of the lift, which meant she was pulling with her lower back instead of her glutes. Wrong end of her body. I’d watched her through three sets without a word, because she’d scolded me more than once that I had a habit of coaching when nobody asked.
She caught me looking and set the bar down. “What?”
“Nothing.”
She stared at me.
“Your shoulders. They’re rolling forward at the top. Lock them down, drive through your heels.”
“Iamdriving through my heels.”
“You’re driving through your toes.”
She gave me a flat, unimpressed look, telling me she was not in the mood for correction. Then rolled her eyes, bent down, and reset.
“Show me, then.”
I came up behind her, one hand flat on her shoulder blade and the other low on her stomach. “This shoulder down, pin it. Same with the other. Engage right here.” I pressed lightly with my palm. “When you come up, you come up from your legs. Let the floor push the bar.”
She nodded and lifted, came up clean and re-racked it. Looking back at me. “Better?”
“Better.”
“Don’t get cocky.”
“Yougot cocky, Lyss.”
She laughed and we ran three more sets until she had it by thesecond, and on the third I just stood behind her and watched her do it right.
“Thank you, Coach,” she said without looking at me when she finished.
I realized I had been standing there just smiling at her. I’d been doing that a lot lately.
She started putting the dumbbells away, and I came up behind her and smacked her ass. She made a small affronted sound that said she liked it but wasn’t going to admit it.
“Julian!”
“Hmm?”
She turned around and put both hands flat on my chest, leaned up, and kissed me, quickly, then stayed there a second with her hand still on my chest, smiled, then turned to get the next pair of weights.
“So, Mrs.Whitaker called me again last night at nine o’clock, about her landlord. She’s decided I’m her attorney, Julian. I told her I’m not a tenant attorney, I’m a person who knows how to read a lease, and she said ‘that’s what an attorney is, sis,’ and hung up on me. Then called back ten minutes later about her cousin.”
I hadn’t moved. I was still standing exactly where I’d been when she’d kissed me, looking at her back while she set dumbbells in the rack. My heart was going too fast for a man who’d finished his workout fifteen minutes ago.
My hands had gone cold in a warm room, and I told myself it was the water I hadn’t drunk since the second set. Elevated heart rate, cold extremities, that tracked. I stood there with the bottle six feet away and didn’t go get it, because whatever this was, it wasn’t dehydration, and I’d known that since the second her mouth left mine.
She was still talking, her voice coming to me at the level of a blur. I looked at the small curls that had escaped the elastic at the back of her neck, the ones I could’ve drawn from memory by now, and the thought arrived plain and whole and three words long.
