"Submission-only," Hector said one morning, "means the door matters more than the room. Any fool can get into a bad position. You will practice getting out of them until getting out is boring. When it is boring, you are safe. When you are safe, you can think. When you can think, Kyle is in trouble, because that boy has been thinking at one speed his whole life."
"And if he taps me early?" Tomas said. It was the question he had not asked in front of anyone else.
"Then you tap," Hector said, without pausing, "and you come home, and you fix the number eleven bus, and Sofia eats her breakfast with her father who has all his arms working. This is the rule under all the rules. Say it back to me."
"If it comes, I tap and I come home."
"Good. Now I can teach you the rest. A man who cannot say that sentence is not brave, he is just expensive to insure." Hector rose, with the chair's help and a muttered negotiation with his hip, and took the center of the mat to demonstrate a sweep so old it had no fashionable name. His body, at sixty-six, performed it the way a signature is performed, without flourish and without doubt. "Your father would have liked this one," he said, surprising them both, because Tomas's father had been dead nine years and Hector rarely spent the memory aloud. "He never understood the fighting, but he understood a man finishing what he started at a speed he could afford. He said that to me once, at your sister's wedding, about the dancing."
"He was a terrible dancer," Tomas said.
"He was a magnificent finisher of dances," Hector said, "at a speed he could afford. Again. From the left side, which you hate, which is why we do it."
From the left side, which he hated, Tomas began to improve in the unglamorous currency of inches. His knee learned the new load and stopped filing complaints. His weight, without any announcement, settled three pounds lower, into the shape his frame had been built for before the depot and the night shifts and the years of eating standing up in his own kitchen. Ben Tully looked him up and down in the locker room and declared that the depot was losing a heavyweight and gaining a problem, and left a banana on his locker every day for a week with the regularity of a religious observance.
The young apprentice, Davy, started a sweepstake on the outcome and was shut down by Okafor from the board with a look that Tomas would have paid money to learn. In its place, without Tomas ever quite discovering whose idea it had been, a collection appeared in the depot office in an envelope marked with nothing but his route number, small bills mostly, some coins, a note from the night cleaner in handwriting he did not recognize that said for the lights. He took the envelope to Grace Nolan at the community center that same evening because it was not his money and he wanted it counted by other hands than his own.
Grace counted it at her desk with the door open, in accordance with her own rules, which she explained while she worked. "Every dollar for this night gets counted twice and written down where anyone can read it," she said. "That is why people trust a total, Tomas. Not because the number is big. Because the counting is boring and public." Grace Nolan was forty-eight and ran the center the way Okafor ran the board, from inside a permanent suspicion that good intentions were no substitute for a spreadsheet. She had gray coming into her hair in one decisive stripe and a voice that could lower a room's temperature by agreement. "Your coworkers," she said, sliding the receipt across, "have opinions about park lighting."
"Everyone has opinions about park lighting now," Tomas said. "Three weeks ago nobody in this town could have found the switch."
"Three weeks ago nobody had watched a man get surrounded on a path they walk their dogs on," Grace said, and then, more gently, because she was not a woman without gentleness, only one who rationed it to where it would work, "It is not the worst reason a town ever had to learn where its switches are."
Across town, in a gym above a tire shop that smelled of rubber and old coffee, Kyle Rennick was having a different kind of morning. Frank Oduya had agreed to coach him on terms, and Frank's terms, it turned out, were not the terms Kyle had been imagining when he pictured a comeback montage. There was no camera. There was no new walkout song. There was a mop.