“Come on,” he said, and started pushing me around.
“Oh, forget it, Louie. I’m not training for any fight or anything. After all, we can—”
He opened the window, pulled off the screen, dropped it to the ground, tossed out my running-shoes, pants, and light sweater, and then, before I realized what he was intending to do, picked me up as though I had weighed precisely nothing, and tossed me out after them. Then he closed and locked the window.
The door was locked. It was cold out there on the ground. I picked up my clothes and moved around to the side of the house away from the highway, dressed in shivering silence, took a deep breath, and started jog trotting after Louie along the road. Every step was agony.
Louie kept watching me over his shoulder, looking at the expression on my face, the way I was moving my legs. He seemed to know exactly when the soreness began to leave me, and then again knew exactly when the breathlessness became acute.
We walked all the way back, taking deep breaths. I suddenly picked up Louie’s trick of breathing with my diaphragm, sucking air way down, squeezing out every last bit of it before taking another deep breath.
Louie, watching me, nodded approvingly.
We went back to the house and put on the stiff set of fighting-gloves. Louie said, “I’m going to train you to throw a hard punch this morning. Now swing one right at this glove. Put everything you’ve got right behind it. No, no, no. Don’t draw back.”
It seemed interminable hours that we worked out there in the sunlight, and then Louie had me under the shower, was kneading and pounding my muscles again, and by the time I was up and dressed, Helen Framley had the kitchen full of the fragrance of steaming coffee.
Later that morning I got a lead.