callus

Her hand had been rough with calluses around my wrist, and she wore the clothing of a man.

“I want to build up a callus of hard work,” Fisch said.

I remembered how her hands felt in mine, warm, deeply lined, callused from a lifetime of hard work.

“There’s a little bit of calluses built up where the rib was broken. But it’s mostly comfortable now, nothing too crazy.”

Eventually, that callus cracks and you almost get drowned in a flood of emotion, which is sort of my last few years.