Running shoes, one year later

The kid at the running store held Dana's old shoe up to the window like an X-ray and pressed his thumb into the heel.

"These did some work," he said.

He turned it over. The tread along the outside edge had worn as smooth as a bar of soap, and there was a hole over the left big toe that Dana had been pretending not to see since August. He asked how many miles she figured were on them. Most people shrug at that question. Dana took the log out of her bag, which by now was on its third green spiral notebook, and said, "Three hundred and sixty-four. Give or take the ones I forgot to write down."

He looked at her for a second. "You're a nurse," he said. It wasn't a question.

The part after the good part

A year before, on a Monday in October, she had put these shoes on for the first time in a year, run two slow miles along the canal, and written Ran. in the log. When people heard that story they tended to picture it climbing from there like a staircase. It didn't.

November and December were good. Ran showed up two and three times a week, and then with numbers after it: Ran 2.4. Ran 3, walked the hill. She said good morning to the heron on its rock by the bench, and the heron, as a matter of policy, said nothing back.

Then January. The hospital was full the way it is every winter, the unit was short, and the staffing office started calling with the bonus rate. She picked up. Everybody picked up. Four extra nights in three weeks, and the sleep window she had guarded for a year folded like a lawn chair.

She stopped running without ever deciding to. One week she was too tired, and the week after that she was simply out of the habit. Near the end of the month she came home at eight in the morning and saw that the laces on the shoes by the door were tucked back inside. She didn't remember doing it.

The log said no for six weeks. Just no, in small letters.

What got her through it, of all things, was the boring pages. She had kept that log through a whole winter once when nothing seemed to be happening (the winter she nearly threw it out), so she knew what a flat line felt like from the inside. A bad six weeks was a bad six weeks. It was not a verdict. When she mentioned it at her checkup, her doctor asked about extra shifts before Dana had finished the sentence.

So she started over where she had started the first time. Stop picking up. Box fan. Alarm at noon. Walking before running.

In February she walked the canal and the heron wasn't on its rock. It wasn't there the next week either. Dana had no idea where herons go in February, and she felt, absurdly, stood up by a bird.

It was back in the second week of March, on one leg, as if it had never left. She jogged the last half mile home.

Company

Kemi was a respiratory therapist on nights, forty-four, with two teenagers and a laugh you could hear from the nurses' station with the doors closed. One morning in April she watched Dana change into her running shoes in the locker room and said, "You run? After this?"

"Not after," Dana said. "I sleep first. I'm not a lunatic."

Kemi had run in college and not since, which she described as twenty-two years of meaning to. She asked, in the careful way people ask to join something private, whether she could come along sometime.

Dana almost said no. The canal at noon was hers: slow, quiet, an arrangement between her, a bench and a bird. She said yes mostly because she couldn't think of a polite reason not to.

Kemi talked for the entire first mile. Her son's driving test. The new ventilators. A television show in which everyone was a lawyer and also, somehow, a vampire. By the bench Dana was laughing too hard to breathe and had to walk, and Kemi walked beside her without comment and kept talking. It turned out that running with someone who didn't care about your pace was a different sport from running alone and caring about it too much.

They ran Wednesdays after that, when their schedules lined up, and some Sundays when they didn't. Kemi's first two weeks were mostly walking, and Dana, who knew exactly what that was like, never once mentioned it. In August Kemi found a Thanksgiving morning 5K that ran partway along the same canal and sent Dana the sign-up link three separate times. Dana wrote maybe in the log, which from her was nearly a signature.

The same Monday

The anniversary went by before she noticed it.

It was a Monday in October again. She woke at noon after her last shift, made coffee, and ran three miles alone because Kemi was at one of her son's things. The water was low and green. The heron was on its rock, facing the wrong way, ignoring her as usual. Her calves were sore from the Wednesday before, and her left foot felt the hole over the big toe every time it landed, and none of it cost her the rest of the day.

It was only that night, paging back through the old notebooks to add up miles for the running store, that she found the same date a year earlier and the one word under it. She looked at it for a while. Then she went back to adding.

The kid rang up the new pair, plain grey with a stripe she would not have picked herself, and asked if she wanted him to toss the old ones.

She said no. She told him they were for walks, and for mud, and for the Thanksgiving race if it rained. At home she set them by the door beside the new ones, laces out.