I watch as Carol slips out the door. She says she wants to leave us with some “father-son-time”. But really, she just wants to go play pickleball. She’s not as young as your mother, but she’s spry. Aging well. Unlike me, I suppose.

She’s right, of course. Time with you is what I want. Given my age, who knows? This may be the last time we get to see each other.

“What were you and Carol talking about?” I ask you. “You sure were laughing a lot.” Whoever had so much to laugh about with their stepmother?

“Oh, just catching up.”

You laugh some more. It’s a desperate sound as though your throat were the rapids and your breath the fish fighting to leap free. “I just tend to laugh a lot. To keep things more chill.”

As if things need to be more chill in here with the AC running. Besides, you laugh because you’re nervous. A tick you’ve picked up from your mother’s musclehead husband. I keep all this to myself, as I do most things these days.

You fill up my silence by talking more and the things you say rush by. There’s little I can grab on to. I am glad you’re here. I’ve missed you. And I love you. Carol has reminded me to tell you this. And I will, but only right before you leave so that it can mean something.

As you’re talking, you’re wiping off the curtains of sweat from your forearms that have yet to dry from the minutes you’ve spent in the Denver heat: the walk from the plane to the car from the garage into the house.

It’s your “hyperhidrosis” or excessive sweating, as you’ve explained.

“Have you been getting any treatment for it?” I ask. If such a thing exists.

You say you’re trying a sweat inhibitor. Oxy something. Not the bad kind, you assure me, though that’s not what I’m worried about with you. I’ve always thought it’s the anxiety that makes you gush waterfalls from your hands and forearms. Medication could help. I find it mystifying that your mother will allow you to take an antiperspirant drug, but not a pill to address anxiety. But what do I know. I’m just a lifelong apprehensive whose life got more bearable when I started taking meds ten years ago. Carol’s idea.

That was her first big win with me. And since, I’ve learned the sublimeness and tranquility possible through acquiescence. Though I wish I’d have learned that with your mother, she was so impetuously young when I married her. Nineteen years younger, Carol reminds me. We never had a chance, I’m fond of saying. To which Carol retorts that we never had a chance because your mother had been a former student of mine from the semester I taught German at the community college. Don’t date any of your professors, I want to tell you, but you have more sense than that.

I ask you about grad school. A safe topic, school. Something you’re good at. Especially with how much of it you’ve had.

“Well. I’m glad you ask…” Would I mind being your guinea pig? you ask. You want to lead me in some PT exercises.

“Oh, no thanks. Carol and I take a vigorous walk each morning at Confluence Park. I don’t need any PT right now. We’ll all go down there tomorrow. To Confluence. There’s some new graffiti installments by the convention center you might get a kick out of.”

Undeterred, you insist I practice the exercises with you. A cocktail of pride and annoyance at your gumption fizzes inside me.

“Why can’t you do this with Carol?”

“I don’t know her that well,” you say.

“Exactly. Wouldn’t that make her better to practice with? Besides, she’s ten years younger than me. And more flexible.”

“When I get back to Portland, my rotation switches to a retirement home. Besides, I’ll probably end up working primarily with the elderly.”

“So, I’m a perfect guinea pig.”

You laugh again.

“What makes you want to go into this kind of thing?”

“I think I’d be good at it.”

“Tell me more.”

“I think I can help people,” you continue. “Nice hours. Salary’s decent. And regular.”

Not like when you were trying to be a musician. Those poor guitars. All those perspiration stains! And it’s more active and health-conscious than programming. And it’s less cutthroat and stressful than running your own business. And it’s not as hard as being a doctor. Which I think you could have become had you just hung in there. You could have become any of those things if you’d just hung in there.

By the time I was your age, I was a U.S. military intelligence station chief in Frankfurt, spying on the Russkies and their east German vassals. This was after the missile crisis and before the Wall fell. The threat had not yet moved on.

Where’s the stick-to-itiveness? These last ten years, despite all your good sense and education, you’ve been going from job to job. You’ve been slipping and sliding around like the cab driver in The Bishop’s Wife, stepping out onto the frozen-over-pond to blunder antically about. Until, of course, suave Cary Grant’s dark-suited angel steadies him and releases him into a specimen of virtuosity on skates. Where’s your angel? Your Cary Grant?

And because I don’t know what else would help you, I sit on one of the kitchen table chairs and I do what you’re telling me: lift toes, then legs, then knees.

“How’s that feeling?” you ask.

Like nothing. I’m 74, not 94. 70 is the new 40, sonny. “Fine,” I say.

“No worries,” you say. “Let’s try something more rigorous.” You unroll a thin foam mat, telling me to lie down, belly up.

“I’d rather not.”

“It’s all good,” you say. A sheen of sweat shrink-wraps your forearm which you try to towel off. But even as you’re setting the towel down, your pores are excreting more sweat. Droplets plunge onto the dining room parquet. “I’ll just practice on someone else. Don’t know who. But, I’ll figure it out.”

And next thing I know, I’m supine.

You tell me we’re going to do some core work. I look at the pooch that has settled forlornly above my waist over the last twenty years, the product of a lifelong love of good bread. You kneel over me and tell me you’re going to wrap your arm beneath my back. And before I can object, you do so and I realize that other than stiff hugs, this is the only time I can remember us ever touching each other. Not that uncommon for sons and fathers, I imagine. Following your orders, something I’m not used to doing, I use my abdominal muscles to push my back into your hand a dozen or so times.

“That’s going to get your abs warmed up. Keep your shoulders back. And your back straight.”

The light lit of your voice and its friendly cadence disguises how you’re bossing me around.

You have me lift my knees up one at a time which I know is going to make my gut protrude.

But I do it and I’m rewarded by a pleasant animal power tightening in my core. One I haven’t felt since bootcamp fifty years ago.

“Shoulders back, don’t forget. Good! And breathe. Now we’re cooking!” And you laugh. It’s different than before; this laughter is full-throated and joyous, seeing the strain on my face.

“What’s next?”

“Lift your knees up. Put both hands on those knees. And push knees and hands against each other.”

Now it’s me that has the river running from my glands. Outside, a Jacob’s ladder of light repels down from a slab of cloud. And inside, the pulleys of muscles beneath my skin function faithfully even after all this time.

“Keep your head on the floor. Let your abs do all the hard stuff. We don’t want to get sore necks. Sore necks suck.”

Your accommodating banter passes the time and before I know it, I’ve done two dozen reps. Catching my breath, I lie contentedly, looking up at you as you must have looked up at me from your crib. You’re a beautiful boy.

“Hey. You’re good at this PT stuff!” Those old fogies are going to like you! The grandmas especially. Unseen, your Cary Grant has arrived. Your angel. And he’s holding you and guiding you into your own. The threat has moved on.

You go all golden retriever, offering me a hand up. I wave it away, but just as my hands have left the ground and I’ve lifted myself up off the floor, a spasm shock-troops through my back.

I reach for your strong, ready arms and hands, aglow with your youth and potential and… Sweat! As I grab the slick surface of your forearms, I slip. And as I’m sliding down and away from you, I’m struck by how cold you feel.

I cry out. Not Carol’s name, but your mother’s. And as you’re getting smaller and farther away and as I’m bracing for impact, I see your face—its features frozen wide and arcing.

And I know that for you, this is what you’ll see now whenever you think of PT. For you, this is another ending and beginning, terrible and new and somehow the same.

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Shaun Anthony McMichael is the Pushcart-nominated author of the novel WHISTLE PUNK FALLS (Alternative Book Press, 2025); THE WILD FAMILIAR short stories (CJ Press, 2024); and the poetry collection JACK OF ALL…(New Meridian Arts, 2024). Since 2007, he has taught writing to students from around the world, in classrooms, juvenile detention halls, mental health treatment centers, and homeless youth drop-ins. In addition to teaching English to immigrants and refugees at a public high school, he hosts an annual literary arts reading series, Shadow Work Writers.