The Gym That Walked Down Main Street

My mother told me at Thanksgiving that Cyrus’s December was the worst he had had since he bought the place.

The screen printing machine came on the Thursday, the way my uncle said it would. It sat in a crate in the middle of my old room for three weeks.

Trevor painted the walls a color I did not like, a kind of gray-blue. He took my dad’s mirrors down and leaned them in the back, carefully, with a moving blanket between each one.

But nobody came to order shirts. The high school did not order shirts. The rodeo committee did not order shirts. The businesses on Main Street, who had all watched the iron go by their windows that Saturday, did not order shirts.

I do not think anybody meant it as a punishment for Trevor. Most people liked Trevor. It was more that every person who would have walked into that room for a shirt would have had to walk into the room where my gym had been, and look at the place where the racks stood, and I don’t think anybody in town could make themselves do it.

By the week before Christmas there was brown paper taped over the inside of the front window. The shop never opened.

Trevor came to see me in the middle of December.

It was a bright, cold morning, about ten below with the sun out, the kind of morning where the snow squeaks under your boots. He came in the side door of the feed store while I was cleaning up after the 9 o’clock. He was carrying something wrapped in a moving blanket.

It was one of my dad’s mirrors, the big one that hung at the end of the old room, the one everybody used to check their squat depth.

“I thought you’d want this,” he said. “The others are in the back. I’ll bring them all. I can bring them today.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He stood there holding it. Then he said, “I didn’t want the room, Paige. I never asked for it. I just didn’t know how to tell him no.”

“I know,” I said.

“He’s not a bad man,” Trevor said. “He just thinks I need somebody to hand me something. He’s been thinking it my whole life.”

I took the mirror from him and leaned it against the wall. Then I went to the front counter and got a membership card out of the drawer and wrote his name on it.

“Six in the morning,” I said. “Monday, Wednesday, Friday. No charge until you’ve got a paycheck.”

He looked at the card for a long time.

“I don’t know anything about lifting,” he said.

“You carried 4,000 pounds out of that room by yourself in the dark,” I said. “You know more than you think.”

He came that Monday at six. He has not missed a Monday since. In February he got on with the county road crew, running a grader, and the first thing he did with his first paycheck was pay me for two months.

My uncle did not come.

I saw him at church most Sundays. He sat on the other side of the aisle, toward the back, where he always sat. On the Sunday after it happened, the pastor prayed for “everyone who carries burdens for their neighbors,” and I saw my uncle look down at his hands.