I stared at the motel
window.
The affair suddenly felt smaller.
Painful, yes.
But smaller.
“Why would Derek challenge me to fight over the house?”
Rebecca inhaled slowly.
“Because I don’t think the fight is about the house.”
Friday arrived.
Now Derek was in front of me again, breathing harder than he should have been.
Three minutes remained.
He had underestimated my conditioning.
That was understandable.
I looked fifty when my knee hurt.
I was forty-six.
Derek was twenty-eight.
But endurance isn’t always youth.
Sometimes endurance is spending seven hours pinned behind a concrete barrier in 120-degree heat waiting for darkness.
Sometimes endurance is dragging a wounded friend seventy yards while your own leg is leaking blood into your
boot.
Sometimes endurance is coming home from war and learning how to sit through Thanksgiving dinner while everyone asks if you “ever killed anybody.”
