Spotter's Call

My name is Jolene Greer, I'm 34 years old, and I've been mopping other people's sweat off of flooring for about four years now. My wife Trudy is 33 and she sets the routes at The Ledges, which is the climbing gym where I clean. It's a mid-sized place wedged into a strip mall between a discount tire shop and a laundromat, and if you've never thought about what a climbing gym smells like at the end of the day, let me tell you, it smells like feet and rubber and somebody's abandoned protein shake.

That night I was on the women's locker room, which is always the worst job of the night because the benches collect chalk and hair and the shower drain collects everything else. I had my earbuds in one ear only, the way I always do, because Mabel, who manages the place and is 52 and does not miss anything, likes to be able to holler at me from the doorway. And while I pushed the mop back and forth under the benches I kept replaying the morning in my head.

Here's what happened that morning. I came in early to drop off Trudy's thermos that she'd forgotten, and she was up on the ladder working the overhanging wall, and when she looked down at me it wasn't a hello look. It wasn't the look she gives me over breakfast either, which is soft and half asleep and mostly about coffee. It was more like she was trying to solve a problem and I was the problem. She held it maybe three seconds too long, then went back to screwing holds into the wall like nothing happened. I stood there with the thermos in my hand feeling like I'd missed a step on a staircase.

We've been married six years and our sex is fine. I want to be fair when I say fine. It's not bad, nobody's unhappy, we still do it maybe twice a week and she always makes sure I get there. But lately I've been turning that morning look over in my head while I scrub toilets, and I keep landing on the same question, which is what does Trudy want that she isn't asking for? Because I know my wife, and my wife does not ask for things. She just watches and waits and figures you'll either notice or you won't.

So there I was, mopping, chewing on that, when I heard the front desk jingle and knew closing had come. Mabel locked the doors at nine. The last customers trickled out around nine fifteen, all of them saying sorry excuse me as they squeezed past my mop bucket, and then the gym went into that hollow echoing state it does when it's empty, all the crash pads stacked and nobody breathing hard anywhere.

Trudy stayed late. She does that sometimes when she's tweaking a route, sitting on the mats with her laptop and her tape measure, but that night she wasn't tweaking anything. I came out of the locker room with my bucket around nine forty and she was standing near the boulder wall with her arms crossed, just watching me. I rolled the trash bin over to the chalk bins to empty them, because the chalk bins at The Ledges fill up fast and the dust gets in your hair and down your collar no matter what.

And she watched me do the whole thing. All four bins. I could feel her eyes on my back the way you feel weather coming. Every time I glanced over she wasn't pretending to look at her phone or anything, she was just looking at me, plain as anything, and neither one of us said a word about it. I emptied the last bin into the trash, dusted off my hands, and she turned and walked back toward the setting room like she'd just remembered an errand. I stood there in the chalk dust wondering if I'd imagined the whole morning or not.

Then Mabel found me by the front desk around ten. She had her keys jangling in her hand and that particular tight look she gets when the building is doing something it shouldn't.

"Jolene, honey, there's water or something back in the hallway. Can you check the mop closet before you clock out? Jacqui said she heard dripping when she was grabbing her bag."

Jacqui is one of our instructors, 28 years old, working on her lead certification, and she notices everything. So I said sure, of course, grabbed my flashlight off the cart because that hallway light has been dead for a month and Mabel keeps forgetting to file the work order, and headed back there.

The back hallway at The Ledges is the saddest part of the whole building. Break room on one side, mop closet on the other, a flickering bulb halfway down that only works when it feels like it. I clicked my flashlight on and walked the length of it listening for dripping and not hearing any. When I got to the mop closet the door was standing open a few inches, which was my first clue, because I always close it and I'm the only one who uses it.

I pushed the door open with my shoulder and my flashlight landed on Trudy.

She was just standing there in the dark between the shelf and the mop sink, arms at her sides, not doing anything, not holding a tool, not looking for anything. In the flashlight beam her eyes went bright and she didn't blink. My heart did something complicated, half jump scare and half something else I didn't have a name for yet.

"Trudy? Mabel said there's a leak."

She didn't answer that. She reached past me, pulled the door shut, and took the flashlight out of my hand and set it on the shelf behind her, and then the closet was almost completely dark, just that thin line of light under the door. I could hear her breathing and I could hear the dryer next door in the laundromat going through the wall, that low mechanical thump, and my own pulse getting loud in my ears.

Then she said, quiet and flat, "Don't say anything," and she put both hands on my shoulders and walked me backward until the shelf edge dug into my shoulder blades and I was pinned there between a wall of toilet paper and my own wife.

I want to be honest about what happened in my head in those few seconds. It wasn't smooth. There was a part of me that wanted to say her name, ask what's going on, are you okay, all the sensible wife things. But the other part of me, the part that had been chewing on that morning look all day, clamped its mouth shut. She said don't say anything, and apparently what I'd been wondering for weeks was exactly this, whether she wanted something she couldn't ask for out loud, and whether I'd give it to her if she just took it.

So I didn't say anything. My heart was slamming so hard I could feel it in my throat and my fingertips and probably in my knees. In the dark I heard her breathe out through her nose, one long breath, like she'd been holding it all day. Her hands stayed on my shoulders and then one of them slid up the side of my neck and her thumb found my jaw, and she just held me there against the shelf, breathing, while the laundromat thumped through the wall and the floor drain gurgled somewhere under our feet.

It was the strangest and most wanted moment of my marriage, standing in a mop closet that smelled like bleach with my wife's thumb on my jaw and neither of us saying a single word. I could feel her leaning closer, close enough that I could feel her breath on my face, and my whole body was waiting to find out what she'd decided to do about the problem she'd been staring at all morning.

Then her hand left my jaw and went down, and I felt fingers hook into the loop on my belt where my janitor keys hang. Six years of her telling me to stop jangling through the house with those keys, and now here she was tugging at them. She worked them off the loop slow, careful, like she was unwrapping something, and I could hear the little metal sounds of them coming free, the clip, the ring, the keys themselves shifting against each other. I had no idea what she was doing. My brain was trying to make it romantic, like she was going to pocket them and take me home, some symbolic thing.

What she did was hold them out at arm's length and let go. They hit the concrete floor with the loudest crash I have ever heard in my life, that big ring of brass and steel on bare slab, bouncing once, twice, settling. I flinched so hard I nearly took us both down. In a gym that size, after close, with only Mabel up front and maybe Jacqui still in the parking lot, that noise carried. My mouth opened to say something about it, some instinct about noise and getting caught, and her hand came up and covered my lips before any sound got out, and she held it there, flat and firm, and I understood.

This wasn't an accident. She hadn't fumbled the keys. She had taken them off my belt, aimed them at the floor, and dropped them, on purpose, and the whole time her other hand stayed on my chest pinning me to the shelf. She was writing the rules of the whole thing right there in the dark. Be quiet. Be still. Don't ask. Everything she'd never been able to say in our bedroom was in that crash of keys, and the fact that my brain, which is not a fast brain, understood it instantly told me she'd been right to trust me with it.

Then she went down. That's the only way I can describe it. She peeled her hand off my mouth and she dropped to her knees in front of me on that hard concrete, and I heard it, the slap of her palms and knees hitting the floor, a sound she'd never once made in front of me in six years. I have knelt on that floor a thousand times scrubbing grout and I know exactly what it does to your kneecaps, and she did it without a sound of