Memphis

She doesn’t seem as screwed up as her family says she is. I’ve been working out here for more than a year, and I didn’t know the Valentines had a daughter until a few months ago when all that crap with that big-time financial guy was all over the news. When the story broke on the afternoon news, I was in the gym training with Leo and Mrs. V was working on the books in the office. We had on the small TV they used to keep tethered up in the corner. Mrs. V ripped that TV down the next morning, and nobody’s brought it up since.

I watched her kick the office filing cabinet so hard she dented it, and then she began to pace in the small area behind the desk, chewing at her nails and spitting off the ends while muttering swear words. When I asked what had her so pissed off, Leo didn’t want to tell me at first, but when Mrs. V went to get a trash bag and broom to sweep up the shards of glass and bits of plastic from the TV, he let it spill that the woman in the story was Archie and Angela’s daughter.

The first mention referred to the woman involved as Olivia Stone, but by nightfall the media had those details sorted out and reported her real last name. Mrs. V became obsessed with the stories, and I always wondered why she never went up to Washington to help her daughter—or why there weren’t phone calls. Leo wouldn’t answer my questions after that first conversation. In fact, he didn’t say her name to me again until two weeks ago, when he told me Oliva was coming to stay with him for a while.

I expected someone hideous. A real monster. Not the way she looked; I’d seen her on TV. I knew she was a pretty girl, but the kinds of shows that would blast her face on the screen never really showed what kind of person she really was. I know what she looks like running from a drugstore to a taxi, trying not to be caught by cameras or shouting reporters. And I know what she looks like when she’s staring off in the distance in a courtroom wearing whatever some lawyer probably told her to wear.

She struck me as a girl who might be quiet, I guess. I didn’t expect her to be funny. And I sure as hell didn’t mean to watch her last night, but damn am I glad I was standing where I was, when I was. The curves of her body peeking through that thin white T-shirt would have probably caught any man’s attention, but that’s not why I kept looking. I’m not sure I can pinpoint exactly what it was about the way she looked up at the sky, then down at me, but the feeling made a dent in the center of my chest. Not attraction—though she is definitely attractive, in a really interesting way. It’s more of a lingering side-effect type thing, like déjà vu.

I don’t think she realizes exactly how much of her I saw last night, because there’s not a hint of embarrassment in her today. She marched into the club this morning with a bang—literally. She was carrying this enormous box of files, and from the corner of my eye, I noticed she was balancing the box against the same office doorknob she was trying to twist open. Leo was wrapping my hands, and by the time I jumped up and rushed over to her, the files were on the floor and she was swearing.

“Nice job, hero. You got to me just in time to pick this shit up,” she said, tossing the torn box on the floor with the rest of the mess. She flung the office door open and has been sitting at the desk rubbing her temples ever since.

My inside voice keeps screaming “distraction” at me. It’s also telling me to quit being nice to a girl who seems to have a chip the size of Texas on her shoulder.

“You know, you don’t actually have to pick all of that up.” Leo’s words are slurred by the wad of chew pushed in the space between his gums and cheek.

It took me about twenty minutes to get the folders back into a pile. I can’t help her with the order the pages are supposed to be in, but I can be nice.

“Nah, it’s no trouble.”

I wrap the pages in what’s left of the cardboard and get to my feet just as Leo spits into the bucket by the office door.

“That’s Liv, always telling people what to do. Hell, she didn’t even have to tell you; you just went and became her bitch.” He laughs out hard, the ball-busting kind I’m used to from him, but his laughter stops and his cheeks sink when he glances through the open office door where his niece is staring at him with glowering eyes.

“What? You’re bossy is all,” Leo says, palms out to his sides as he takes a few meandering steps away before walking over to a group of regulars who just came in.

I give my attention back to Liv, and her eyes are no longer lasers on her uncle. Instead, they look heavy, sinking into her cheeks, which are slowly sinking back into her palms.

“I guess I need to do more speed work,” I say, grin twisting high on one side of my mouth. A snorty chuckle comes out. It’s my nervous laugh, and I can feel it brewing to come out again while Liv simply raises her brow and moves her focus to me.

“You know, because I didn’t get to you fast enough to…to…”

I step forward and set the disorganized pile of papers on the end of the desk, the side flap of the box falling open the moment I let go.

“To stop the mountain of shit that is my parents’ business files from falling out of a box that’s been eaten by moths every day for the last six years?”

She touches the top of the files and slides a few of the folders around with her fingertip before breathing out a short laugh and falling back into the chair. It rolls a few inches backward with the force. She looks like an angsty teenager, stiff straight legs, holes in the knees of her jeans, and some concert T-shirt tucked into the front of her pants.

“That’s not moth damage. Box is just old. And yeah, sorry I was too slow to hold the paperwork mountain up.” I lean into the doorframe and wait through her sigh. I’m hoping she’ll look at me, but she doesn’t. I don’t know why I want her to. My friend Miles would say it’s because I need everyone to like me—abandonment issues and all that. Maybe he’s right. Whatever it is, after this attempt, I need to let it be whatever it is, because I can’t be distracted by a popularity contest for approval from one single person. I don’t have that kind of time. And the lineup of fighters I need to get through this year are only focused on one thing—knocking my ass out and putting me in my place.

I wait long enough for it to become awkward. Liv is lost somewhere far away. She isn’t sad about it, and she isn’t angry really. She’s resentful as hell, but mostly I think she’s just resolved to whatever place her mind is.

“Yeah, so…anyway. I’m just gonna finish my conditioning, so if you have anything else heavy, I can—”

She cuts me off.

“I’ll be fine.”

Her eyes move to me briefly and her mouth is tight.

“Okay,” I shrug and raise my brows. I’m not going to get a smooth exit from this conversation, so I just walk back to the speed bag where a chuckling Leo is waiting for me.

“She that way with everyone?” I pull the tape around my right glove tighter, ripping with my teeth.

“Ha, you just got her nice side,” he says, tightening my right glove for me. “You should see her at Thanksgiving when she’s going at it with her mom. Pre-fight smack talk’s got nothing on a holiday round between Liv and Angela. Been that way since she was fourteen or so.”

Fourteen.

That’s how old I was when I got a postcard from my real father. The postmark was from Memphis, Tennessee. The picture on the front was of Beale Street just after a rain, the purple sky behind it a perfect match for the neon lights along the roadway. Felt weird for someone I’d decided to hate to send a photo from some place so beautiful.

He signed it Robert Delaney. The handwriting was the same as it was on the note tucked into the blanket that swaddled me on the Fourth Precinct footsteps in Philadelphia, where he’d left me when I was just a few days old. That note explained that my mother had died while giving birth, and he had no business raising a baby. He kept his name a secret then. He didn’t want to be found.

Robert Delaney made it far in fourteen years, but he still said I was better off where I was. In fact, that’s all he wrote on that card—that I was better off. At fourteen, I was positive I knew better, so I ran away from the foster family I’d been living with for a year and slipped onto a bus to Memphis. I didn’t have an address, but I had a street. I went to eleven hotels before someone recognized the name. Everything this man ever owned was bundled up in a box stashed behind a hotel desk, like it was waiting for me. He’d passed away days before from a stroke. I’ve always believed it happened the moment his fingers let the post card fall into the mailbox. The hotel was getting ready to donate his things, and I don’t think they expected a kid to show up to claim them.

An army coat, a proper shaving kit, a diary of everything I’d missed—every wish and regret he had about leaving me—and boxing gloves. They were well worn, scarred from training and battle rounds in the ring. I don’t wear them now, the leather’s brittle and the padding thin. But I did then. I wore them at the police station while I waited for someone from Child Services. I wore them on the airplane they put me on back to Pennsylvania, and I wore them at the group home I stayed at until I was eighteen. Though, as I got older, I kept them in the duffle bag under my bed and only took them out on rare occasions.

I loved those gloves because of the words he’d written during our years apart—honesty poured from pens and pencils—the words sloppily written and often misspelled. He filled pages on my birthdays, and sometimes I could tell he was drunk. He rarely wrote about himself, but when he did, it was as if he’d planned on me finding this book one day. He wrote about his struggles with alcohol, about his abusive father that nearly beat him to death when he was fifteen, and about my mom, a seventeen-year-old he’d lived next door to and ran away with right before their high-school graduation. Their relationship was volatile, and they would lose touch but always come back together. She had her own troubles, it seemed, and during one of those times they met up again, I was created. The timing was wrong all around, neither of them in a place to parent.

For years, I imagined who he was—based on the history he’d chosen to share with me. I decided he’d gone by the name of Memphis, because that’s where I’d found his ghost. I made everyone else call me by this name I’d made up, and on the day I turned eighteen, I took his last name: Delaney.

I couldn’t tell what kind of fighter he was in real life. The only proof I have that he ever fought at all, other than the gloves, was a yellowed scorecard with Archie Valentine’s name written on the back. My father was knocked out in the fifth round in some small time undercard fight in New Orleans. The way I see it, though, he went five rounds with a legend. Leo and Angela don’t remember him. I’m sure he was some nobody to them. But they took me in like family when I finally got the courage to come here to train. Even if he’s just a man I’ve built from my imagination, I’m going to honor him as if it’s all true. The pretend Dad feels a lot better than the one I hated when I was a kid. He’s the truest father I’ve ever had, and that’s where my focus needs to be—on training and winning.

I give everything over to the speed bag until the sweat is sliding down the center of my chest and my last clean T-shirt is clinging to me like a second layer of skin. When Leo calls it quits, I pretend to pack up and then let the door fall closed behind him before I pick back up where we’d left off—dodging and weaving, my breath timed with every punch I throw. I get lost in the rhythm. It’s a vicious cadence, the perpetual thumps of my leather-bound knuckles swinging the bag with each knock until my triceps beg for mercy. I push beyond the pain, working through the fatigue until the euphoria fills my chest. It’s a strange sensation to try to explain to anyone who’s never challenged endurance. I feel it push my heart to extremes and flatten my lungs with desperation, but my hands…my feet…my eyes—they never stop. It’s a sweet victory against my toughest challenger: myself.

With a final blow, I falter back until my numb legs sense the edge of the ring behind me, and I rest on the mat, my neck cradled by the taut rope, my ears pounding as my breath tries to catch up. As tough as this workout was, it’s nothing compared to facing a real man just as intent on exploiting my weaknesses as I am his. I have weaknesses. I have too many.

I pull on the tape around my wrists with my teeth, ripping it away in strings, half wanting to drink four-thousand calories in protein and come right back to this bag and do it all again, and half wanting to run down to Shill’s and pick up a rib-eye and slather it in butter. I decide to do neither when I hear the office door swing open. Music that sounds like it belongs in a retirement home comes streaming out quietly.

“Why Memphis?”

One hand is on her hip, and her ankles are crossed while her weight rests on the inside of the door. I tug at the tape, and only a sliver comes off, so I stand and slide my tired feet over to her, my wrists turned out. When I glance up to meet Liv’s eyes, she jolts the tiniest bit, quickly looking down at my hands.

“Mind?”

She scrunches her shoulders and pushes her hands in her back pockets nervously at first, but eventually breathes out and reaches for my gloves.

“You probably did this a lot when you were a kid, huh?” Her lips twist at both my question, and the stickiness of the tape. She finally grips enough of it in her hand and begins to unravel it from my wrist.

“Not really.” Her eyes flit nervously, darting from her own hands to the wide-open gym off to the side, but never up at mine. The lights are low in the gym, but the bright bulbs from the office ceiling act like a spotlight on her face.

“Your dad didn’t let you watch his fights, huh?” I take over when she frees my right hand, and I begin tugging at the tape on my left.

She steps back, leaning into the doorway again, and her lip pulls up on one side as she scratches at her ear.

“I watched him train, mostly. But Leo did this kinda stuff. We didn’t always live in this place, with the gym right next door. I only really saw my dad when he wasn’t on, ya know? Like when he wasn’t training for a big fight or whatever.” She gives me a short glance then looks down, folding her arms over her chest and rocking on her heels.

“So…Memphis?” She cocks a brow, her eyes sticking to me a little longer. The light brushes her cheek, and I dip my head in response, not wanting to look so long that I notice things. There’s something about Liv that reminds me of home—only I don’t know what home is. I’ve had addresses, but until I started staying with the Valentines, I never had a place that felt like mine. There’s a familiarity here. And I see it in Liv, more than anywhere. Or at least I feel it. It’s like a dull pressure at the center of my chest.

It’s a weakness.

“Didn’t much like the name I was born with, and I like Memphis, so…” I hold out my palms, gloves and tape held in each hand, and force myself to look her in the eyes. Only a second or two passes, but I can tell she’s not buying my lie. It’s the only story I’m giving her, though. You share too much and people start to see all of your baggage.

“Wish I could change mine.” Her eyes are serious when she speaks, and we lock gazes again. As much as I’m lying, Liv is speaking a harsh truth.

I respond with a nod eventually, then lean my weight back in the direction of my locker, falling away from her—from this conversation.

Thing is, even if she did change her name, the world already knows her face. She would never be able to disappear. All I was looking to do was belong. Liv is looking to run. It took me years to find my place, and I’m not leaving it now—no matter how hard it is to keep walking away, to not lick my lips and imagine it’s Liv’s tongue against my skin.

Weaknesses do not belong in the ring, and I need this one to get out of my head.