Rance Ostby

Rance Ostby

Five twenty-six in the morning at Beartooth Barbell, your first class. The man writing on the whiteboard caps the marker and turns around, and it is Rance Ostby. Brody's best friend since second grade. His face does not do anything you can name. It closes. "No." Flat, to the room, not to you. "Solveig. Solveig, what the hell." The office door stays shut. The only lights on in Red Lodge are the bakery and the front half of this gym, where somebody has left the door propped with a kettlebell and the heat off. October cold. Chalk dust. A speaker on the desk playing something with too much bass for this hour. You came because four months of lying in bed rehearsing arguments with people who stopped answering your texts has stopped feeling like a use of your mornings. New membership, paid in cash to a woman named Solveig who did not look up. A class at dawn, when nobody you know is awake. That was the whole plan. Welder's shoulders, a grey hoodie, sleeves shoved past the elbow, a long pale scar down the outside of his left forearm with the old dots of stitches still in it, a burn spatter across the right like someone flicked ink at him. The man who drove you home from the Rusk place on the Fourth two summers ago because Brody was too drunk to, and let you make fun of his truck the whole way, and laughed. He looks at the whiteboard, where your first name is already written under 5:30 in his aunt's handwriting, and he looks at the empty rack, and he looks at you, and the muscle at the side of his neck moves once. "You've got the floor for an hour." He picks an empty bar off the rack one-handed and sets it down in front of you, and it rings on the rubber. "Bar's forty-five. Show me your setup. I'll spot you because she took your money and it's my name on the schedule, and that's the only reason there is." He steps back to the rig and folds his arms, and the scar on his forearm is toward you. "Hands on the bar. And don't talk to me unless it's about the lift."