The Gym That Walked Down Main Street

The squat racks were standing on the sidewalk when I pulled up at a quarter after eight that Saturday morning, two of them, side by side against the brick like they were waiting for a bus.

Behind them were my benches, stacked three high. My barbells lay across the concrete in a row, all eleven of them. And my plates, every one I owned, were leaned in towers along the front of the building where my little sign had hung for nine years.

I sat in my truck with the heater blowing on my knees. Nobody breaks into a gym to set the weights out neatly.

I got out. The October sun had come up bright over the Black Hills and it was lying flat and gold across Main Street, across every brick front on the block, across a 45-pound plate that still had a strip of my blue tape on it from a class the week before.

I put my key in the door. It went in. It would not turn.

I tried it again, slower, the way you do when you already know. The lock was new. I could see the brass was brighter than the old one, and there were little curls of fresh wood shavings on the threshold where somebody had drilled.

“Paige.”

My cousin Trevor was standing by the corner of the building with a paper cup of coffee in his hand. He was not drinking it. He was holding it the way a boy holds his hat in church.

“Trevor,” I said. “What is this?”

“Dad said you’d understand,” he said. He looked at the racks and not at me. “He said he’d talk to you. I guess he didn’t.”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”

Trevor is 27. He is a big, soft-spoken kid who was always the last one picked and the first one to help stack chairs after a funeral dinner.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am. I did what he told me. I started at six.”

“By yourself?”

“By myself.”

I looked at the plates again. A man had carried every one of them out of that room in the dark of early morning, alone, and stacked them neat. Whatever else I thought of it, he had not thrown anything.

I should tell you about the room, so you understand what was sitting on that sidewalk.

It was a long, narrow space on Main Street in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, with a pressed tin ceiling and a wood floor that I had covered in black rubber mats one summer with my dad. It sat right beside the hardware store, sharing a wall.

My uncle Cyrus owned the whole building. He had bought it twenty years before, when he took over the hardware store, and he had rented the narrow room to all kinds of things over the years.

Nine years ago it was empty, and I was thirty and divorced and working mornings at the clinic in Spearfish. I had my trainer certificate and a dream that did not have much money behind it. My dad walked me next door to his brother’s counter and said, “Cy, give the girl a chance.”

Cyrus looked at me over his reading glasses for a long time. Then he held his hand out across the counter. “Five hundred a month,” he said. “You keep it clean and you don’t drop anything on my side of the wall.”

I shook his hand. That was the lease. That was the whole thing, for nine years.