"My knees are a rumor. My hands are honest. The gym on Tabor Street closed in the spring, did Ben tell you. I'm consulting for a place over in Renton now, two days a week, teaching children of rich men to keep their hands up, which they pay for and do not do." A pause, in which Tomas could hear him assessing, the way he had always assessed, through the ear alone. "You sound like a man asleep standing up, Tomas."
"I work. I raise my girl. Sleeping is third on the list and the list is optimistic."
"You were the best student I ever had at seeing a thing before it happened," Hector said, without preamble, because Hector had never once in his life made small talk when a true thing was available. "Not the fastest. Not the strongest. I had faster, I had stronger, God rest two of them and prison keep the third. You saw. A man would decide a thing and you were already standing where the decision was going. Do you still see, out there among the buses?"
"I see a lot of brake wear, Hector."
"Hm." The sound conveyed total disbelief and total affection in one syllable. "Your girl is well?"
"She is the best person in Ohio and the soup at my mother's is preventative, so the weather is handled."
"Then the weather is handled and I will not worry. Listen to me. I am not asking you back. I have never asked you back, you will note, in eight years, which for me is a record of restraint that should be in the newspaper. I am telling you what I tell the rich men's sons. A man does not stop being what he trained to be. He only decides where it goes. Keep deciding, Tomas. The day you stop deciding, it decides for you, and it has no manners." Hector hung up in the manner of his generation, without ceremony, in the middle of what might have been a goodbye, and Tomas stood smiling at a silent phone on a quiet street like a man who had been handed a tool he had forgotten he owned.
What he did not tell Hector, what he rarely told anyone including the mirror, was how the seeing had never left. It was not a gift he used; it was a weather he lived in. In the depot he heard a failing bearing two days before the driver heard anything. Crossing a parking lot he registered, without deciding to, the distances between himself and every moving thing in it, and which of the men coming out of the bar on Third was tired and which was angry, and those were not the same, and the difference mattered, and he had known it mattered since he was seventeen years old in Hector's first gym above a laundromat, learning that a fight was mostly a conversation men had with their feet before their hands got involved. He breathed the way Hector had taught him to breathe, low and through the nose, four counts down like a man descending stairs, without thinking about it, in traffic, in meetings, in the hospital corridor. His stance when he stood at a counter was never quite square. His weight was never quite all on one leg. These were not poses. They were the sediment of twenty years, and they were invisible to everyone in Alder Falls except, now and then, a very old coach on a telephone, and a mother who checked the doors of rooms.
His apartment was dark and orderly and too quiet, the way it always was on Rosa's weekends, and he did the things his mother had predicted in a defiant order: gutters first, standing on the stepladder in the blue dusk with a trowel and a bucket while the swallows cut the air over the alley, then laundry, folded on the bed in stacks so precise they looked machined, then a shower, then a sandwich and a beer he did not cook, eaten at the counter of the diner on Main. He paid, tipped too much, and took the long way home as planned, through Riverside Park, because the evening was fine and cooling and the river path had lamps that came on one by one as the dark gathered, and because a man walking off a diner sandwich and one beer and his mother's half-bowl of soup could pretend, for the length of a park, that an evening to himself was a thing he knew how to have. The apartment would be there when he got back, in all its order. Sofia was at Rosa's, four streets the other way, behind doors his mother had checked with a thoroughness the Pentagon could study, being read to, by now, in a voice doing all the characters. He carried nothing but his keys, his phone, and, because he had packed it at five in the morning out of the deepest habit, the small lunch bag he had never eaten from at the diner, with the apple still in it, swinging at his side. He was aware, amused at himself, that he had carried his lunch to dinner and would now carry it home, and that Ben would hear of it and it would become departmental.