Greta looked at him for a moment with the full, assessing attention she gave to very few things. Then she did something no reporter got and no camera saw. She smiled — her real smile, the dry, brief, Swedish thing her daughter knew — and she dipped two fingers in the bucket, quite deliberately, and flicked three drops of water at the chest of the former face of Northgate Athletic Club, the way a priest blesses or a sister teases. "You are forgiven," she said. "Now you are in my corridor, so you may as well be useful. The bins go out on Thursdays and this is, technically, still Thursday. Hold the door." And Dane Whitaker, 24 and 3, The Weather, held the service door for the night cleaner of the Northgate Athletic Club while she wheeled the bins out into the cold port air, and the two of them stood a moment afterward in the doorway, side by side, watching their breath make brief ghosts of itself over the dark water of Port Ellery harbour, where the ferries were coming in lit and unhurried, one of them, for all either of them knew, dispatched by her daughter. "Stefan," she said, after a while, to the harbour more than to him, "would have liked your third round. He always said a fighter is not who he is when he is winning. Anyone can be winning." Dane waited. "He would have bet money you had no third round in you," she said. "He would have lost. He hated losing. It would have done him good." Somewhere behind them, faintly, through two doors, they could hear Rick Sorensen discovering that his fighter was not at the press conference and beginning the first enquiries of a long night of management. Dane listened to it the way you listen to weather in another county. "He'll find me," he said. "He's good at finding me. He's less good at knowing where I've gone." Then he straightened, and took the long way back with her through the corridor, at her pace, unhurried.
She picked up the bucket — her bucket, reclaimed without ceremony — and went back in to finish her floor.
The comeback offer arrived on a Tuesday, ten days after the exhibition, in an envelope thick enough to have its own intentions. It came from a promoter in Las Vegas by way of Rick Sorensen, who carried it into Diane Kowalski's office with the ceremony of a man bringing a treaty to a summit, and who laid it on the desk between the three of them — because Greta, at Diane's insistence and against Rick's every instinct, was present at the meeting about her own life. The terms were not insulting. That was the trouble with them. A three-fight deal, seniors' circuit money that was real money, a documentary crew, a title invented for the occasion with a belt the size of a serving platter. "Legends' champion," Rick said. "They're not asking you to fight kids. It's an exhibition circuit. Tulsa, Reno, a cruise ship in May. Greta — people are paying to see a fifty-two-year-old woman who was never knocked down in her life. There's nobody else on earth who can sell that sentence." "It is not a sentence," said Greta. "It is a fact, and facts do not improve with travel."
That evening there was a second, smaller ceremony, which nobody photographed because Greta had not thought to forbid it and nobody else thought it was a ceremony at all. Diane presented the youth fund cheque in the club office — the exhibition's proceeds, a sum with enough zeros to re-equip the port youth programme's gym and roof its leaking annexe — and the fund's director, a harried woman named Paula who coached forty harbour kids out of a hall with one heavy bag, cried in the unpractised way of people who are given money for other people. Dane attended at his own request, in a plain shirt, and made no speech, and when Paula thanked him he pointed — not theatrically, but with the new economy — at the woman standing by the door with her coat already on. "Thank the champion," he said. "It was in her conditions. All of it was in her conditions." Paula did. Greta accepted it with a nod and a handshake and the observation that roofs were more important than speeches, and caught her ferry-side bus home in time for supper, and the cheque went into the fund's account the next morning, where money, unlike applause, could be spent twice: once on a roof, once on everything the roof made possible.