Final Coat

I'd been sanding and sealing gym floors for fifteen years, but this one came out sweet. I knelt down and checked the last corner near the bleachers. Sat there on my knee like I was praying.

"It's dry," I said.

Cecilia came over with her clipboard. She was 36, facilities head, sharp as a nail gun. She crouched next to me and tilted her head so the safety light caught the boards.

"Show-off," she said. "You always get a mirror finish?"

"Only when the client hovers for three days straight."

She laughed at that. She touched the wood with two fingers, real gentle, then rubbed them together.

"It's smooth. It's not tacky."

"Told you. Water-based. Cures fast."

"You said forty-eight hours. It's been fifty-two."

"Then it's dry, Cecilia." I stood up and my knee cracked like a branch. "Somebody's gotta be the professional here."

"You're the professional. I'm the one who has to explain to a dean why his gym smells like a nail salon in September." She wrote something on her clipboard. Probably checking me off. "Garret, you're 38, you've done half the floors in this county. Why do I still check your work?"

"Because you like being in charge."

"Guilty," she said it flat, no shame in it. "Sign here. And here. Initial that one."

I signed. Her pen had a chewed cap. That's the kind of detail you remember about a job, the chewed pen cap, the way the door sticks, whatever. I was 38, single, never married. My daughter had gone off to college in August and the house was so quiet I'd started talking to the dog. So maybe I lingered on jobs more than I used to.

Before I could pack up, the equipment room door rattled. Somebody had a key. Cecilia straightened up like she was expecting them.

"That'll be Jamila," she said.

A woman came in first, mid-thirties, athletic build, hair up in a knot. Behind her a big guy in a fleece carried a rolled mat under each arm.

"Hey," the woman called. "Sorry, we're not stepping on the floor, are we? I saw the signs."

"Floor's done," Cecilia said. "This is Garret. He did it. Garret, Jamila. She rents the gym for her yoga classes."

"Late-night classes," Jamila said. She waved at me with her chin, hands full. "Mostly when nobody's here. Which is why we're here at nine on a Friday, like weirdos."

The big guy set the mats down by the wall. "Robbie," he said, and stuck out his hand. "Outdoor ed. I carry things. It's my whole job."

We shook. His grip was fine. Cecilia asked Jamila what she needed.

"Small workshop. Private. Ten people, Saturday morning. I need the equipment room for bolsters and blocks, and I need to not have a janitor walking through mid-session." She looked at me. "Is the smell going to be a problem? People breathe deep in there."

"Give it till midnight," I said. "Air it out and you're fine."

"We'll wait," Robbie said, easy as that.

"You'll wait?" Cecilia said.

"Sure. We brought stuff." He unzipped a duffel he'd set against the wall and pulled out a bottle of red wine. Held it up like a trophy. "Anybody?"

I'd been trying to place Jamila since she walked in, and then I had it. I'd seen her at the coffee shop on Miller Street, the one near my lumber yard. She'd handed me a flyer while I waited for my order, some promotional thing for her classes. I'd stuck it in my jacket and found it there a week later, all wadded up.

"You gave me a flyer once," I said. "At the Bean Counter."

Jamila squinted at me. "Did I? What was I promoting?"

"Your studio. It was purple. I kept it in my pocket till it fell apart."

"Oh my god, that was months ago!" She laughed. "And you didn't come?"

"I frame floors for a living, lady. My idea of stretching is reaching for the nail gun."

"He's lying," Cecilia said. "He does tai chi in the parking lot at lunch. I've seen him."

"You have not," I said.

"On Tuesdays. Little old ladies outpace you."

Robbie was already twisting the cork out with his pocketknife, the way guys do who won't carry a corkscrew. "So we're all staying. Nobody leaves. That's settled." He pointed the bottle at Cecilia. "You're facilities. You got cups in that office of yours?"

"I have a mug with a chip in it and a mug that says World's Okayest Supervisor."

"Perfect. Four mugs, four people."

"That's not how wine works," Jamila said. "But go on."

Cecilia went and got the mugs. While she was gone I asked Jamila what the workshop was. She got a little cagey about it, which I noticed.

"Breath work. Partner stuff. It's hard to explain."

"Try me. I'm a carpenter, I'm dumb."

"You're not dumb. People who work with their hands are the least dumb people I know." She sat down on a stack of folded mats, careful, off the actual floor. "It's about touch. Trust. Most adults are starved for it and pretend they're not."

Robbie snorted. "She means it's a cuddle workshop."

"It is not a cuddle workshop."

"It's a cuddle workshop with a fancy name."

"Robbie teaches sixth graders to paddle canoes," Jamila told me. "So you can weigh his opinion accordingly."

"They're adults-in-training," he said. "Anyway, exes can insult each other freely, that's the deal we have."

"You dated?" I asked.

"Two years," Robbie said. "Ended well. Mostly."

"It ended because he sulked for a month."

"I did not sulk. I processed."

"You sulked at a lake, which is the worst place to sulk."

Cecilia came back with the mugs and Robbie poured. I took mine and sat on a folding chair. The gym was quiet in that way big rooms get after hours, all that empty air. The floor shone under the dim lights like a lake at dusk. I'd built things my whole life and this was the part I liked, the finished thing, before anybody scuffed it.

"So the plan," Cecilia said, and crossed her legs. She'd taken her blazer off at some point and had a t-shirt under it, which surprised me a little. "Sealant off-gasses till midnight. Nobody drives. Jamila and Robbie can't set up till it's aired. Garret can't leave because I need his final walkthrough."

"I could leave and come back," I said.

"You could. But you won't." She sipped her wine. "Because you've got nowhere better to be, and I say that kindly."

"She's not wrong," Robbie said.

"Shut up," I told him, friendly.

Jamila looked around at the three of us. "This is a strange little group."

"Welcome to campus after hours," Cecilia said. "It gets stranger. Wait till you meet the night custodian. He does impressions."

"Of who?" Robbie asked.

"Of everybody. Mostly the dean. It's unnerving."

We drank. The wine was cheap and fine with me. I asked Jamila how long she'd been teaching.

"Eight years. Before that I managed a rock gym." She tucked one leg up under her. "I like bodies. What they can do. What they hold onto."

"Carpenter," I said. "Same thing, worse vocabulary."

"Same thing exactly. You know where every board is stressed."

That landed somewhere in me. My daughter's mom used to say I paid more attention to wood than to people, and she wasn't wrong either. But Cecilia was watching me when I looked up, and she didn't look away. Neither did I, for a second, and then Jamila asked Cecilia how long she'd worked here and the moment broke off clean.

"Six years," Cecilia said. "Divorced four. It's a whole biography, do you want the documentary version or the short one?"

"Short," Robbie said.

"Long," Jamila said, at the same time.

They looked at each other and laughed. Cecilia held up her mug.

"Compromise. Medium." She settled back against the bleachers. "I got married at 28. It ended at 32. He was fine, I was busier than him, and somewhere in there we became roommates who argued about the dishwasher. And you?" She pointed her mug at me.

"Never married," I said. "One kid. She's 19 now, away at school. Her mom and I never made it official, we just ran out of steam. That's the medium version."

"That's the sad version," Jamila said.

"It's the true version. Same thing sometimes."

Robbie refilled everybody without asking. "To true versions," he said, and raised his mug. "And to floors that don't stink by midnight."

We clinked mugs in a dark gym on a Friday night. It was a strange little group, all right. And nobody, not one of us, made a move to leave.

After a while we moved up onto the bleachers, because the folding chairs were cold and the bleachers at least had a view of the floor. Cecilia sat one row up from me, Jamila across, Robbie stretched out with his boots hanging over the edge. The wine was doing its slow work.

"So Jamila," Cecilia said. "You said most adults are starved for touch. Are you talking about us or you?"

"Both," Jamila said, no hesitation. "Mostly me, if you want the truth. I touch people all day. I adjust shoulders, I correct hips, I put my palm on somebody's back and say breathe. And it all goes one direction. Nobody puts a hand on me unless they're paying for the class."

"That's bleak," Robbie said.

"It's honest. When's the last time somebody hugged you without you starting it?"

Robbie thought about it. "May," he said. "Maybe."

"See. We're all walking around like untouchable statues and calling it professionalism."

I turned my mug in my hands. "I'll say something, since we're confessing."

"Go ahead," Cecilia said.

"I've been doing floors for fifteen years. Schools, church gyms, rec centers. Hundreds of gyms. And I have never once had sex in