By noon she had coaxed a retired teacher through shoulder rotations the woman swore she could not do, had shown a lobsterman half her age how to get up from the floor using a chair and his pride in that order, and had eaten her lunch standing at the counter because the break room chairs made her knee ache if she sat too long in the cold. Her colleague June, who had worked at the clinic for twenty years and kept a tin of mints in every pocket she owned, leaned in the doorway and said, "Your grappling people called. Something about Saturday. The lady organizer sounds like she runs a ferry schedule and a small country."
"Nadia Frost," Rowan said. "She runs the showcase."
"She wanted to know if the mats at your place pass some inspection. I told her I had no idea what you people do up there but that you come in Mondays walking like a newborn deer, so the mats are probably fine."
"It is a sail loft," Rowan said, for the hundredth time, because June enjoyed calling Saltline Grappling Collective a place, as if it were a barn or a rumor. "It was a sail loft. Now it has mats."
"And grown adults pay to be folded by you."
"And I pay," Rowan said, "for the privilege of being folded by them."
June offered her a mint. "Take one. You have the face you make when you are thinking about your knee and pretending you are thinking about something else."
Rowan took the mint. Her knee had been talking since the rain started, a dull, familiar commentary under the kneecap, not pain exactly, but a reminder with good diction. She flexed the leg under the counter, felt the small familiar catch and release, and thought, as she often did at midday, about how strange it was to have built a life on the far side of an injury. The young wrestler she had been would have looked at the woman she was now, thirty three, tying her hair back in a rehab clinic, measuring other people's steps and calling a scuff a victory, and would have felt sorry for her. The woman she was now looked back at that girl, all speed and stubbornness, wrestling through a sore knee for three weeks before it finally tore because she had believed that slowing down was the same thing as giving up, and felt sorrier. Ilya Sorin had been the first person to say it to her plainly, years later, on the mats at Saltline, when she was trying to relearn a sport her body no longer allowed her to play the old way. Slow is not late, he had said, in his dry, accented voice, watching her try to muscle her way through a guard pass she no longer had the spring to finish. Slow is on time. You are simply keeping a different appointment than the one your panic made for you.
Saltline Grappling Collective sat at the top of a flight of wooden stairs on Wharf Lane, in a building that had spent the better part of a century as a sail loft. The stairs complained under every foot, each in a different note, and the regulars claimed they could tell who was arriving by the sound, the heavy tread of the fishermen who trained in winter, the light rush of the teenagers from the high school who were allowed to train only in the wrestling room downstairs and never, under Walt Finch's absolute rule, in the adult grappling classes upstairs. The loft itself kept the shape of its old work. The ceiling rose to a peak where the great sails had once been hoisted for repair, the windows along the harbor side were tall and salt filmed no matter how often anyone cleaned them, and in the rafters there were still iron hooks and a faded chalk line where sailmakers had marked their cuts. Walt, who had leased the place for nineteen years and renewed the lease each time with the air of a man signing a treaty, refused to cover the hooks or paint over the line. "A place should remember what it was for," he said. "So should a person. Does not mean either of them has to keep doing it the same way."
The mats covered most of the floor now, blue and grey, their seams taped and retaped, and along the inland wall ran a low bench, a shelf of battered water bottles, a whiteboard with the week's schedule written in Walt's square hand, and a corkboard layered with photographs. The photographs were the gym's true record. Tournaments, belt promotions, a snowed in open mat where everyone had trained in socks because the boots had left meltwater everywhere, Tess Gallagher holding a medal and a black eye with equal pride, Rowan herself, younger, with a fresh brown belt tied crooked and an expression of disbelief, Ilya standing behind her with one hand on her shoulder, looking at the camera as if it had interrupted something more important. Newer photographs crowded the edges now, printed from phones, all action and blur, someone mid throw, someone inverted, legs in the air, the kind of images that traveled well and explained nothing. The gym, like every gym Rowan had ever known, was slowly dividing itself between the people in the old photographs and the people who wanted to be in the new ones.