Frank Oduya came on the Wednesday, in the rain, to the depot, because Marcy, who had taken his measure in a thirty-second phone call, would not give him Tomas's home address but had agreed, with the air of a woman permitting a controlled substance onto the premises, that he could wait by the parts cage until the end of shift. He was not what Tomas had pictured from the name on the gym's sign. He was fifty-two and looked sixty, a broad man gone a little soft in the middle from years of coaching other people's conditioning, with a shaved head and rain standing on his shoulders because he had not thought, or had not allowed himself, to bring an umbrella. He held a carrier bag from the bakery on Main Street. It had gone transparent with damp in patches.
"I bought pastries," Frank said. "My sister said don't come empty-handed and don't come with a speech, so naturally I have pastries and a speech. The pastries are better. Eat one so I can stand here and feel I've done the first thing right."
Tomas took one, because his mother had raised him to accept food offered in apology, and because Marcy was watching from the dispatch doorway with an expression that said she would intervene at the first sign of theatre. They stood by the parts cage while the shift changed around them, other men's eyes sliding politely away, and Frank Oduya, coach of five young men currently famous for the worst reason, looked down at his own wet shoes for a long moment before he spoke.
"I suspended them," he said. "All five. Before the police finished typing. Ricky says I am ruining his life over a park scuffle, and Josh's father has called me twice, and Deacon's mother came to the gym and cried in my office, and Pete, Pete is the only one who has said the word sorry to anybody and he said it to the hedge, I think, for the bottle. Kyle has said nothing. That is what frightens me. The others are scrambling. Kyle is deciding what he believes, and a young man like Kyle, deciding wrong, can set like concrete." He turned the bakery bag in his hands. "I taught them. Not that. I want to be clear and also I don't want to hide behind clear. I did not teach them that, and some of what I did teach them made room for it. Speed. Aggression. Clips. We film everything, Mr. Herrera. We film takedowns and we post the best five seconds and we call the other four minutes boring. I have been selling the tap as a failure for three years and calling it motivation. I watched your forty-one seconds maybe thirty times. You know what I kept seeing? Not the holds. The letting go. Every time, the instant it was done, your hands opened. My boys tap and then they argue with the tap. They treat it like a negotiation. I taught them a sport and forgot to teach them the stop."
"You taught them the stop," Tomas said, quietly. "It's in the rules you set for your own mats, or Sergeant Lindqvist wouldn't have the phrase instant release ready when she talked about the report."
Frank looked up sharply, then, unexpectedly, laughed once, without humour. "Amy said you'd be fair. She said it as a warning." He sobered. "I am not here to ask you to drop anything. The charges are the charges; I have told their families that and I will tell a judge that if I am asked. I am here because Grace Nolan at the community center has a proposal, and the athletic commission has a version of it too, and before it arrives through official paper I wanted a man, not a gym, to stand in front of you and say: I am ashamed of my part in those boys being in that park in that condition. Whatever you decide about the rest, that part is owed and I am paying it in person."
Grace Nolan's proposal arrived, as Frank had predicted, on official paper, hand-delivered to the Walnut Street house on Friday evening by Grace herself, who refused Tomas's offer of coffee with the practised speed of a woman who knew that coffee created obligations and preferred her obligations scheduled. She was forty-eight, director of the Riverside Community Center for eleven years, which in Alder Falls made her a kind of unelected mayor of everything that actually functioned. She had known Marisol. Most of the town's functioning adults had known Marisol, and carried the knowledge the way Tomas did, as a standard quietly applied. Grace sat at his kitchen table, in the chair Rosa had vacated with diplomatic speed, and laid out the paper, and a second sheet, and a pen she did not yet offer him.