The Gym That Walked Down Main Street

“You could have told me.”

“I’m telling you.”

“You could have told me a month ago. You could have told me in August.”

He took his glasses off. For a second he looked like my dad, which was the worst part of the morning.

“The boy has failed at two jobs,” he said quietly. “He washed out of the welding program at the tech school, and he lost the job at the car lot in Spearfish because he couldn’t talk a man into anything. He’s twenty-seven years old and he’s living in my basement. I want to give him something that’s his. I’m his father. That’s my job.”

“I understand that,” I said. And I did. That was the thing. I understood every word.

“Then you understand.” He put his glasses back on. “There was never any paper, Paige. It was month to month. It was always month to month.”

“It was a handshake,” I said. “With my dad standing right there.”

He picked his pen back up. “Your dad’s not here to argue for you,” he said. “And I’ve got customers.”

He looked past me at the woman with the furnace filters. She did not move. Nobody in that store moved.

I turned around and walked out, and the bell rang over my head again, and I have never in my life heard a bell sound so much like a door closing.

I stood on the sidewalk next to my own squat rack and I thought it through, the way my dad taught me to think through a hard lift. Set your feet first. Then breathe. Then decide.

I could have fought him. People asked me afterward why I didn’t, and I always told them the same thing. A fight over a handshake lease would have dragged on for months, and every one of those months my doors would have been shut, and my people needed their mornings. Ingeborg did not have months to sit in a chair waiting for two Hollenbecks to finish being stubborn.

And here is the part nobody knew yet, not even my mother.

On Tuesday of that week, I had signed a lease on the old feed store three blocks down Main Street, at the corner where the grain elevator used to be. It had sat empty two years since the co-op moved out to the highway. I wanted it for a second room.

It was nine hundred dollars a month. It had a concrete floor that a man could drop a truck engine on. It had big south windows and an old loading dock, and on Tuesday the owner, a retired rancher, had handed me two keys on a piece of baling twine.

The keys were in my cup holder. I could see them through the windshield of my truck.

I had not moved a single thing in yet. The room was swept and empty and waiting.

I looked at my watch. It was 8:38.

My husband was not there that morning. I want to say that, because people have asked. He and his brother had left at four to haul calves to the sale barn, two hundred miles round trip, and it was the biggest sale of the fall. I called him from the sidewalk.

He was quiet for a long time after I told him. Then he said, “Do you want me to turn around?”

“No,” I said. “You’d lose the whole check. Sell the calves.”