"Friday," the official said, stamping the last form with a sound like a small verdict. "Six o'clock call. Rules at six-thirty, read aloud, both camps present."
"Both camps," Freya repeated, writing it down, and then looked up at her mother with an expression Greta had not seen since the girl was nine and organising the evacuation of a flooded tent with total command of the situation. "We will be there at five-thirty," Freya said. "We are people who are early now. Apparently we always were."
Driving home through the rain, with the folder on the back seat and the wipers keeping their patient time, Greta thought about the scales, and the stethoscope, and the signature with the q, and the plain pen; about paperwork, which she had avoided for twenty years as one avoids a room where something happened, and which had turned out, in her daughter's hands, to be just another kind of wrap: a promise you made in advance, in writing, about how you would protect the things that mattered. The past was in its locker. Her hands were passed, her heart was fifty-eight and lying about nothing. Everything that could be signed had been signed.
"You'll eat properly this week," Freya said, at the lights, in the voice of a dispatcher rerouting vessels. "And Thursday you're off your feet by eight. I've told Eddie. He's put it on the board in the cleaner's cupboard, in capitals, so it's basically maritime law."
"I am fifty-two, Freya. Not a ferry."
"Ferry, wall — same maintenance schedule," Freya said, and drove on through the rain, pleased with herself, and Greta laughed in the passenger seat of her own car, quietly, at the outrageous ease of being looked after.
By six o'clock the Northgate Athletic Club held more people than it had held since the cannery strike dances of another century, and it held them in the way of buildings that remember crowds: easily, and with a kind of relief at being used for its purpose. Diane Kowalski had capped the tickets at the fire limit and then, being Diane, had sold the fire limit. The port youth fund banners hung at both ends of the hall — straight this time, levelled by Big Eddie with a spirit level and strong opinions — and under them the folding chairs ran in rows to the walls, and the walls themselves were lined two deep with people who had come, in the proportions Greta would understand by the end of the night, roughly one third to see a spectacle, one third to see a reckoning, and one third because a woman they knew cleaned their gym, or their school, or their ferry terminal, and they had decided, with the instinct of a working port, to be present when the world finally looked at her properly.
She watched the beginning of it from the doorway of the locker room corridor, in her cleaner's clothes, because her shift — her actual shift, shortened and rearranged by Diane over her protests — did not end until the doors opened, and there had been a spilled sports drink under the bleachers and a bin that needed emptying by the ticket table. She dealt with both. Then she went and hung up her mop, and washed her hands, and changed, in the small room off the corridor, into the clothes Freya laid out for her like a quartermaster: plain shorts, plain top, nothing with a name on it. Barlow came with the hand wraps — plain wraps, new, bought by him from the club's own supplier and presented with an embarrassment he tried to hide — and did her hands himself, wrist, back, fingers, the old sequence, while Freya held the headgear and the officials talked in low voices at the door.
The arrivals had their own order, and she had noted it from the corridor with a cleaner's eye for how a building fills. The ferry crews came in packs, still in port jackets, taking the seats along the east wall as if mooring. The cannery families — the club had two generations of them — took the west. Tessa worked the aisles with a notebook rather than a phone, which the older members approved of out loud. Big Eddie, in a shirt with a collar, an event so rare that Diane had photographed it, moved through the crowd with a collection bucket for the youth fund that he shook at people with the gentle menace of a man who had emptied their bins for a decade and knew their secrets. The bucket came back heavy. It came back, in fact, heavier than the ticket predictions had suggested, because Port Ellery had understood something about the evening that the regional press had not: this was not a comeback and it was not a execution. It was a town turning out to stand in a room with one of its own, at the exact moment the wider world finally learned her name.