bench press

I didn’t knock on the door. I went around to the backyard. There I found the Carpenter treehouse, which looked like something out of a Disney movie, in a massive old oak tree in the backyard. A bit behind it was the workshop, the rolling door of which was currently wide open. An old radio played classic rock in the background, and one of the better human beings I knew was on a weight bench, working out.
Michael Carpenter was in his fifties from the neck up, with silvering hair, grey eyes, and a well-kept salt-and-pepper beard. From the neck down, he could have been twenty or thirty years younger. He was performing basic bench presses with around two hundred and fifty pounds on the bar. Michael was doing slow reps with it.
I hadn’t seen the start of his set, but I counted fourteen repetitions of the movement before he carefully set the bar back onto the rack, so he was probably doing twenties. The struts of the bench creaked a bit as the weight settled onto them.
Michael glanced up at me and smiled. He sat up, breathing heavily but in a controlled manner, and said, “Harry! Up early or late?”
“Late,” I said, and bumped fists with him. “Going light this morning?”
He grinned a bit wider. “Most mornings. It’s my shoulders. They just can’t take the heavy stuff anymore.”
I eyed the weights and said, “Yeah, you wimp.”
He laughed. “Want a turn?”
I felt awful. And angry about it. The Winter mantle didn’t care if I’d missed sleep and felt terrible. It wanted me to kill or have sex with something. Feeding it exercise was as close as I could get. Dammit. “Sure.”
He got up amiably, using an aluminum cane lying beside the bench to stand. Michael had taken multiple hits from an AK-style assault rifle out on the island a few years back. He shouldn’t have survived it. Instead, he’d come out of it with a bad hip, a bum leg, a bad eye, a severe limp, and the only non-posthumous retirement I’d ever heard about for a Knight of the Cross.


Peace Talks Chapter 17, Page 159-160