"I do not want the name back," Pete said. "That is sort of the headlines, Deac." He pressed the button with his thumb and put the phone face down on a repaired mat and picked up the heat gun, and his hand, Tomas would have been interested to learn, was shaking. "It kept wanting me to be the guy in the clip. Every time I opened it, it showed me his face to sell me shoes. I am done being introduced to myself by that thing."
Deacon did not delete anything. Deacon struggled, in the unphotogenic way that real struggling mostly happens: he did the hours, he signed the sheets, he repaired his share of path and mat, and then he went home to a group chat that still sent him the clip with new captions, and some nights he laughed before he could stop himself, and hated the laugh, and said nothing to anyone until the night he said it to Kyle in the tire shop parking lot, in the rain, in one rush.
"I do not know how to be the only one who stopped thinking it was funny," he said. "The others from school, man. You lot are all doing this. I am doing this. And then I go on my phone and it is like the park is still happening in there and everyone is still fine with it. I feel about twelve years old. I am twenty-five and I feel twelve."
"So leave the chat," Kyle said.
"They are my friends since I was twelve."
"So were we," Kyle said, and Deacon looked at him, rain in his eyelashes, and something in the arithmetic of that landed where three weeks of tampering stone had been preparing the ground. "I am not saying it is easy, Deac. I am saying I know which version of you I am standing in the rain with, and it is not the one in the chat. Choose like a person who has to live in the town. That is what Frank says. I am just the messenger because I am too tired to be original."
Deacon left the chat that night, at one in the morning, and told nobody, and slept, Kyle learned later, better than he had in a month, which he announced to the crew the next day with the embarrassment of a man reporting a miracle he did not have the paperwork for.
The media found Tomas at the depot, which he had asked them, politely and through Grace, not to do, and so the media found him next at the center, with a microphone and a framing already built and waiting for him to stand inside it. The young reporter from the regional station was not unkind. She was worse than unkind, from Tomas's point of view: she was enthusiastic. "Dad versus Bully," she said, delighted, testing the phrase on him like a jacket she was sure would fit. "That is what everyone is calling it. The hero dad, the park, and now the rematch, under lights. How does it feel to get to finish the story?"
"It is not a rematch," Tomas said. "A rematch is when two people had a contest. We did not have a contest. We had a bad morning." He could see Grace, behind the camera, making the small level gesture with one hand that she used on committee meetings and now, apparently, on him: steady, smaller. He took a breath that Hector would have charged extra for. "And he is not a bully in a headline. He is a man of twenty-six who is doing his service hours in the park, same as his friends, and on Saturday he and I are going to grapple, submission-only, with a referee, to raise money. The money puts lights on that path so that the next bad morning happens in the light, and it starts a fund for families at this center who are choosing between a bus pass and a pair of shoes. That is the story. It is less exciting. It is the one that is true."
"It tested well," the reporter said, a little wounded, "the other way."
"I am sure it did," Tomas said. "Most untrue things do. They are built for it." He said it without heat, and Grace, behind the camera, allowed herself one nod, and the segment that ran that evening used forty seconds of him and led, to the station's credit and Grace's private satisfaction, with the lights and the fund. Ben Tully watched it in the depot office with his boots up and said, "Herrera, you are a natural. You bored a television station into honesty. That is a submission if I ever saw one."