The work itself became part of the training, though he did not say so to Hector, who would have charged the city for the insight. A day spent torquing bolts overhead was a day spent learning exactly where his shoulder's honesty ended. He started doing his physio exercises in the pit between jobs, a resistance band looped around a post, while the radio played and the young apprentice, Davy, counted his repetitions with theatrical seriousness and got every third number wrong on purpose. He was home by four most days, asleep on the couch by nine most nights with an ice pack sliding slowly off his knee, and up at four forty the next morning to do it again.
On the fourth morning Hector brought a second person onto the mat, a heavyweight from the center's evening classes named Osei, thirty years old and built like a wardrobe, who had volunteered with the shy pride of a man being trusted with something breakable. "He will not hurt you," Hector said. "He will also not help you. Osei, if you help him, I will know, and I will be disappointed, which is worse."
Osei did not help him. Osei lay in his guard like a dropped piano and made Tomas work for every inch of angle, and twice Tomas felt the old panic rise, the young man's panic that said explode, spend everything, get out now. Both times he heard Hector's pencil stop moving, which was worse than any instruction, and he breathed, and set his heels, and started sooner and smaller. The second time, very slowly, the angle came. He did not finish anything. He was not supposed to finish anything. He found the position and held it while his lungs burned, and Osei, sweating cheerfully, said from inside the architecture of it, "Man, this is horrible. This is like being parked."
"That," Hector said, writing again, "is the nicest thing anyone will ever say about your grappling, Tomas. Write it on your mirror."
He told Sofia none of the details, because Sofia was seven and the details were not hers to carry. At breakfast she asked if training was like school for bodies, and he said that was exactly what it was, and she considered this and asked if he got a grade. "Your Uncle Hector gives the grades," he said. "He is a hard marker."
"Does he use stickers?"
"He uses a pencil and disappointment."
Sofia nodded with the gravity of a diplomat receiving intelligence about a foreign power. "I will make him a sticker," she said. "Then he has to use it."
The weeks took on a shape, and the shape had Rosa Alvarez at both ends of it. Rosa was sixty-eight and lived two doors down in a house that smelled permanently of cinnamon and furniture polish, and she had been collecting Sofia from school since Sofia was four and Tomas's roster had stopped pretending to be a nine-to-five job. Now she collected Tomas too, in her way. She left soup in containers with his name written on the lid in marker, as if there were a crowd of thieves in his own refrigerator. She ironed his one good shirt without being asked and returned it with a note that said a man could fight for a town and still look pressed.
"You are all making a fuss," Tomas said, standing in her doorway with the shirt over his arm.
"We are making a schedule," Rosa said. "A fuss is what the television is making. Sit down. Your daughter is doing her homework at my table because your table is covered in those band things and a knee brace, and a child should not have to do arithmetic next to a knee brace."
On the evenings when he trained late, Sofia did her reading at Rosa's, and on the mornings when he trained early, Rosa arrived at his house at five with her own key and her own opinions and slept on his couch until Sofia woke, so that no part of the comeback cost his daughter a single ordinary hour. This was the arrangement nobody photographed. Tomas understood, with a clarity that sometimes stopped him mid-repetition on the mat, that the exhibition had a corner team of three and only one of them stood at the edge of the mat.
Hector noticed everything and commented on almost nothing, which Tomas had forgotten was his way. Instead the notebook filled. Instead the drills narrowed. They stopped rehearsing the whole of Tomas's old game and began rehearsing the small country where the bout would actually be decided: the first grip, the first angle, the long patient minutes inside the guard, and above all the exits, because Hector had opinions about exits that bordered on religion.