The physical therapist he complained about for six months

The band was yellow, and Marcus Hale took it personally.

He was lying on his side on a padded table in a clinic between a mattress store and an eyebrow place, knees bent, a loop of rubber the color of a highlighter around his thighs, opening his top knee like a clamshell and closing it again. Lena Marsh stood at the foot of the table with a clipboard.

"Your hip's rolling back," she said. "You're cheating."

"I'm lying down. How do you cheat at lying down."

"Your pelvis is cheating. You're the one in charge of it. Start over."

He was forty-one. He framed houses for a living. That morning he had carried a stack of two-by-sixes across a muddy lot, and now a woman who had been in middle school when he bought his first nail gun was making him start over on a set of twelve.

Fourteen, no rail

The first visit had been in September, a few weeks after the doctor, the bloodwork and the index card that now lived in his wallet behind his license. Lena had watched him do ordinary things. Sit in a chair and stand up. Step onto a low box and off it. Squat like he was picking up a pencil. When his hand went to his knee on the way up from the chair, she wrote something down.

"Mornings, zero to ten," she said.

"Four," Marcus said.

She wrote something that was not a four. She asked how much he slept, and he said five hours, and she said, "Well, there's one," and wrote that down too.

Then she asked what he wanted out of this. He told her about the stairs, because it was the only thing he could say that didn't sound like a confession. Fourteen of them, up to his daughter's room. He wanted to take them without the rail.

She wrote it across the top of his chart: 14 stairs, no rail.

"Anything you stopped doing?" she asked.

"Nah. Schedule's just busy."

She wrote something underneath, smaller, and turned the clipboard face down.

What he said about her

Twice a week for the next six months, Marcus complained about Lena Marsh to anyone who stood still.

He complained to Gus, who had worked on his crew for eleven years, on the tailgate at lunch. "She's got me on my hands and knees doing a thing called a bird dog. One arm out, the other leg back, and you hold it. Like a dog pointing at a duck." Gus, who was fifty-eight and had a hip he didn't discuss, cracked a sunflower seed and said that sounded hard. Marcus said that wasn't the point.

He complained to the kid at the lumber yard counter, who hadn't asked. He complained to his wife, Kara, holding up the home exercise sheet, a photocopy of stick figures doing things so small they looked like typos. Stand on one foot while you brush your teeth. Squeeze a pillow between your knees. Lie on your back, lift your hips, and hold it like you're waiting for a bus.

"I carry plywood up a ladder," he said.

"Then this should be easy," Kara said, and taped the sheet inside the cabinet door over the coffee mugs, where he would see it every morning before he was awake enough to argue.

At Thanksgiving he demonstrated the clamshell for his brother-in-law on the living room carpet, to show how ridiculous it was, and Josie laughed so hard she lay down next to him and did them too. After that she did them with him most nights on the rug, and told him when his hip rolled back.

The part he left out when he complained was that he did every one.

December

Except in December.

In December the days got short and a job two towns over ran long, and he got home in the dark and ate dinner standing up. He skipped the homework for a week, then two. He cancelled a Thursday appointment and told the front desk it was the schedule, and noticed how easily the word came out.

On the second Monday of January he knelt most of the day on a cold subfloor, and the next morning he sat on the edge of the bed a lot longer than a minute.

He went back that Thursday braced for a speech. Lena watched him step down off the box, wrote something, and went to the drawer.

"Yellow again," she said, and handed him the band.

That was the whole speech. He did his clamshells without a word, and on the drive home he realized he had nobody to complain to, because the only person who'd earned it was the one driving.

Around then he also told her about the reading he'd been doing at night, and the vendor he'd vetted like a subcontractor, and the lot number he'd matched at the kitchen counter. Lena said that was a conversation for his doctor, and that none of it was going to do her homework for him. He said he knew that. By then, he did.

The back of the chart

By March he was on the green band. Every morning he did step-downs off the bottom stair at home, lowering one heel to the floor on a slow count of three, knee tracking over his second toe the way she had drawn it for him on the back of an appointment card.

At his reassessment Lena ran him through the same ordinary things as September. Chair. Box. Pencil. Then she turned the clipboard over and slid it across the table.

Under 14 stairs, no rail, in the smaller handwriting from September, she had written: Stopped something. Says schedule.

Marcus laughed, alone with her in a room that smelled faintly like the eyebrow place next door.

"So what was it," she said.

He looked at the poster on the wall behind her, a man in the middle of a lunge who had been lunging since at least the nineties.

"Saturday soccer," he said. "I coached my daughter's team."

Lena took the clipboard back, wrote it under the other two lines, and underlined it once. "Okay. Then that's on here now," she said. "Get on your side."

He got on his side. He did not complain. He would pick the complaining back up with Gus at lunch, out of habit, but his heart wasn't in it anymore, and Gus could tell.

Saturday, seven a.m.

That Saturday Marcus was at the bottom of the stairs in his socks before the coffee finished, stepping down off the first one on a slow count.

Josie came down the other thirteen in her pajamas with a bowl of cereal and sat on the third step, just above him, eating. She had the yellow band around her wrist like a bracelet.

"One," she said, with her mouth full. "Two. Slower. Your hip's cheating."

He started over from one.