The offer of a comeback arrived, as Tomas had known it would, in the form of a man with a contract and a card too heavy for the paper it was printed on. A regional promotion with streaming money had watched the hall recording the way promotions watch everything now, at speed, looking for the angle, and the angle they had found was the phrase former champion, which Tomas had been declining to be for eleven years. There were three bouts proposed, real bouts, a co-main place on a card in the capital, money that Rosa priced aloud in the kitchen as a roof, a college fund's beginning, and four years of not listening to the Number 9 bus's differential with his whole body. Tomas read the contract at the depot on his break, all of it, including the parts about likeness and the parts about obligations, while Frank Oduya, who had been sent it too as a courtesy and had driven over in his lunch hour because some conversations should be had in person, watched him read and said nothing until the last page had been turned down flat.
"I'm not going to insult it," Tomas said at last. "It's honest money and it's more respect than I got at twenty-eight." "It is," Frank said. "And?" "And I know what it costs now. I didn't, then. It costs the mornings. It costs being the kind of tired that has nothing left at the homework table. I did the maths in the park, Frank, with hands on me. I'm not a man who didn't get the chance. I got the chance twice, and the second time I got to choose, and I'm choosing the maths I did." Frank nodded once, unsurprised in the way of a man who has made a career of hearing the truth from fighters at kitchen tables and depot benches, and took the contract back to be declined properly, through channels, like a gentleman. "The class, then," he said, standing, "is the other offer, and before you do the maths on it too, know that it was Grace's idea and your old man's ghost's idea and mine, so you'd be declining a committee." Tomas laughed, surprised out of himself. "What class?" he said, and Frank told him.
It was Hector who settled it, the following Saturday, in the community centre hall where the mats from the exhibition night were now stored against the wall like a blue promise. The council would fund a Saturday morning class, adults only, ninety minutes, if Tomas would run it with Hector as second and the club's insurance would stretch, which Grace had already stretched, being Grace, before anyone had asked Tomas at all. It was not to be a fight class. The poster Grace drafted, which is to say the poster Grace wrote in final form and presented as a discussion document, called it Control and Safety Grappling for Adults, and listed what it taught in her large, unarguable hand: how to fall, how to breathe, how to hold a person without harming them, how to be held and not panic, how to tap, how to stop. Under Tomas's name she had written no title, at his instruction, and under Hector's she had written Second, which Hector complained about all the way to the printer and then, at the printer, quietly asked them to make larger.
Kyle Rennick was the first name on the sign-up sheet when it went up at the club in January, written in his own hand, in the beginners' column, where he had promised a hall full of people he would write it. Josh was third. Deacon came on the second week and stayed. Ricky and Pete never joined the class, having discovered, respectively, an electrician's course and a camera, and Tomas thought this was exactly right and said so when Grace worried about the incompleteness of the pattern, because people were not patterns, and a class was not a net. The five of them finished their service hours in February, in sight of the community, as ordered; and on the last Tuesday, Kyle stayed after the others had gone, sweeping the river path with a council broom as Tomas arrived to collect a forgotten water bottle of Sofia's from the park shelter, and they stood a moment in the new light of the lamps Tomas's restraint had paid for and Kyle's labour had installed, neither of them making a speech. "Tuesdays," Kyle said, "I'm on the rota. Paid, now. Grace sorted it." "Good," Tomas said. "It suits you, work that stays done." Kyle considered the swept path, his winter's work, visible the whole length of the park. "Yes," he said, with the wonder of a man trying on a sentence and finding it his size. "Yes, it does."