Every Rep Is for Them
Brian Armer
Marcus had just written his new time on the garage whiteboard when he heard slippers dragging across the floor. His seven-year-old daughter stood in the doorway with her hair pointing in three directions. “Did you win?” she asked.
“I was only racing me.” She studied the numbers. “Then did you lose, too?” Marcus laughed and set down the marker. “Go back to bed, Mia.” “I brought you something.” She held out his coffee, carefully, with both hands.
He had started training before work because last summer she had asked him to chase her up the hill at the park. Halfway up, he had needed to catch his breath. She had waited beside him, pretending to inspect a flower. He knew she was pretending. That was the part he remembered when the alarm sounded each morning.
Lately, though, the times on the whiteboard had begun getting more of his attention than the reason he was writing them. This morning’s pull-ups had left a small callus tear on his palm. He put the marker away and went inside to clean and care for it. The next set could wait.
Mia followed him as far as the kitchen. “Will you still come outside after dinner?” They had been making a little garden beside the fence. So far, Mia had planted three seedlings, labeled four empty spaces, and appointed herself in charge of worms.
“Of course.” She looked at his hand. “You don’t have to dig. I can do that.” He smiled. “What’s my job?” “You have to tell me which things are weeds.”
That evening, Marcus found her waiting beside the back door with two folding stools. She handed him the lighter one. “For the weed expert.” He hadn’t known he was an expert until now.
They sat beside the little patch while Mia pointed with a twig. Marcus identified two weeds and one seedling they would leave alone. She considered every answer seriously. At the fourth plant, he hesitated. Mia leaned closer. “You don’t know, do you?”
“Not yet.” “Can we find out?” He took a photograph so they could look it up together. Mia set a small pebble beside it. “So nobody pulls it before we know.”
As the light softened, she told him about a girl at school who had moved away and the seat that was still empty beside hers. Marcus listened. The twig lay forgotten across her knees. For a while, neither of them looked at the plants.
When she was ready to go inside, he carried the stool in his uninjured hand. Mia took the other one, walking close enough that their shoulders nearly touched. “Tomorrow we can check the pebble plant,” she said.
In the garage, the new time was still on the whiteboard. Marcus glanced at it as they passed. Then Mia called him to come and find the plant’s name, and he went with her.
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