"I know that," Marcy said. "I have known you eleven years. You barely demonstrate how to open the new parts catalogue." She softened, just a fraction, around the eyes. "Two reporters called the depot. One called my home. I told them our employee was unavailable and that the Number 6 route would run on time, which is more than I can promise most Mondays. Go and look at the 14. Its alternator is making a noise like a spoon in a disposal, and unlike the rest of this town, it actually needs you."
He went. The work, as always, received him without commentary. A bus did not care what the internet called you. It cared whether the belt was true, whether the bolt was torqued, whether your hands were patient. Tomas slid under the 14 on the creeper and lay for a moment in the familiar dimness, smelling oil and hot dust, listening to the depot arrange itself above him into its ordinary music, and he let himself remember, because under a bus nobody could see his face change.
He had been nineteen the first time Hector Ruiz let him spar with the older men, and he had been furious for a week beforehand, certain the old coach was holding him back out of jealousy or caution or the plain stubbornness of age. Hector's gym in those days was not much more than a converted auto electric shop off Route 6, with mats that did not quite meet at the seams and a heavy bag held together by tape and optimism. Hector himself had been a wrestler in his youth and a corner man for longer than Tomas had been alive, a broad, quiet man with knuckles like walnuts and a belief, which he stated often and enforced always, that a fighter's first skill was knowing when a thing was finished.
"Again," Hector would say, when a young Tomas, all speed and appetite, held a training partner in an arm lock a half second past the tap because the sensation of winning was still singing in him. "Again, and this time listen." And they would go again, and Hector's stopwatch would stay in his pocket, because time was not the point. The point was the small, clear sound of a hand on canvas, and what you owed it. "Any fool can tighten," Hector said. "A man lets go. The letting go is also technique. If you cannot do the letting go, you do not know the hold. You only know the hurting, and the hurting is the least interesting part and I will not teach it in my gym."
Tomas, at nineteen, had thought this was a speech for other people, for the hotheads and the show-offs. He learned, slowly, in the way young men learn anything worth keeping, by being made to repeat it until it got into his hands and stayed there. By twenty-three he was the regional champion in a circuit that paid in small purses and smaller hotel rooms, and his record had a shape that made promoters use the word future in his hearing. He was not the most gifted man Hector ever trained, Hector told him once, with the brutal tenderness that was his only register of praise. He was the most teachable, which lasted longer.
It was at a regional final in Columbus, with a borrowed robe and his mother praying in the third row with her rosary wrapped so tightly around her fingers it left marks, that he first saw Marisol Vega. She was not there for the fights. She was there because her cousin sang the anthem, badly and bravely, and because the arena shared a lobby with a community health fair where Marisol, then a nursing student, was taking blood pressures at a folding table and scolding strangers about salt with the serene authority of a woman half her size and twice her age. Tomas, with a cut over one eye being butterflied by Hector and the belt, which was mostly vinyl and wishful thinking, cooling against his ribs, had gone out for water and had been told, by this stranger with a cuff in her hand, to sit down before he fell down and made paperwork.
"I just won," he told her, dazed and pleased with himself and bleeding slightly onto his own shoulder.
"Then win sitting down," Marisol said, and pumped the cuff, and wrote a number on a card in handwriting so neat it looked printed. "Your pressure is up. So is your opinion of yourself, I think. One of those will come down on its own."