Chapter 8: Morning Run

At four-thirty the alarm went off, and I swore at it with my eyes shut.

Cal slid his arm across my stomach and said into my hair, "Is that the sound of a woman who runs every morning?"

"It's the sound of a woman who runs every morning even when she's sore in new places."

"I could not be sorrier."

"You're lying."

"I'm lying."

I threw a pair of sweatpants at his face.

We ran in the dark along the river path behind Fairview, in the cold that makes your teeth ache and your lungs burn clean.

He was a better runner than I'd expected.

He ran long and steady, with an easy stride.

When I picked up the pace at the bridge he matched it without a word.

We stopped at the iron railing at the end of the path, steaming, with the black river sliding by below.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"You can ask."

"Why won't you take the money?"

I thought about telling him it was principle.

It would have been a nice thing to say.

"My father ran that gym for thirty years," I said.

"In the nineties he borrowed from a man who owned half the block."

"The man put his name on the sign over the door."

"A developer?"

"A donor. A friend of the gym. He gave us a roof, a ring, a new furnace."

Cal waited.

"Then my father got sick, and the man's lawyers found a line in the paperwork."

"The building belonged to the man."

"The gym belonged to him."

"Dad was a tenant in his own life."

"Dee."

"He worked eleven years of double shifts at a foundry to buy it back."

"He died owning it free and clear."

"He left it to me with one rule."

I turned and looked at him.

"Nobody's name goes on that door but ours. Nobody's money. Nobody gets to own a piece of what happens in there."

Cal didn't say anything for a long moment.

His breath came out in white clouds between us.

"I tried to buy the roof," he said slowly. "I tried to buy you a roof."

"I know you did."

"I didn't understand."

"You couldn't have. Now you do."

He took my gloved hand off the railing and held it in both of his.

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