Dara stared at him.
"I watched it eleven times," he said. "Slowed down. I watched your hands. You never let go of the nozzle. I watched your feet. You planted on the right, you chambered tight, you pushed, you didn't snap. Sole of the foot, center of the body, below the sternum. Not the ribs. Not the face. Not the knee. You put her exactly where she'd land against the car and not on the ground. And then you put your foot down and you didn't move again." He paused. "I've been teaching for thirty-one years, Dara. I have seen black belts with twenty years of experience who could not have done that, with that much control, in that much time, with that much at stake. I don't know if it was the only thing you could have done. But I know it was the least. And I know you stopped." He looked back at the lake. "That's all I ever asked of you. That's all the rule ever meant."
Dara put her face in her hands.
"They're still going to suspend me," she said through her fingers.
"Yes," said Coach Imura. "Probably. For now." He put a hand on her shoulder, the way she had put her hand on the shoulder of the woman in red, kneeling in the puddle. "So we'll fight that. Outside the ring. With rules. In a room, with a referee. That's allowed."
Her grandmother called at eight o'clock exactly. Odessa Whitfield had never in her life called anyone before eight o'clock in the morning, on the principle that only bad news and bill collectors called before eight, and she was neither.
Dara took the phone out onto the porch of the cabin and sat down on the top step and looked at the screen for a long moment before she answered. Then she answered.
"Hi, Grandma."
"Don't you hi Grandma me," said Odessa. "Tasha showed me. On her phone. Last night. And then she showed me the other one. The long one. That boy sent it to the police and somebody at the police department has a cousin who goes to my church." A pause. "Are you hurt?"
"No, ma'am."
"Is the other girl hurt?"
"Her ankle. A sprain. Maybe some bruises." Dara swallowed. "I didn't mean to hurt her, Grandma. I just wanted her off the pump. There was gas everywhere. I could smell it. I just—"
"I know what you just," Odessa said. "I watched it eleven times. Tasha slowed it down for me. I saw what you did." Another pause, longer this time. "Do you know what I saw?"
Dara did not answer.
"I saw a little girl climbing up a slide after Kevin Marsh," said her grandmother. "Except she didn't push anybody off. She put her hand out and stopped somebody falling. And then she climbed down and checked if they were all right." Her voice did something Dara had never heard it do before. It wavered. Odessa Whitfield's voice did not waver. It had not wavered at Dara's mother's second sentencing, or at the hospital when Dara broke her arm at nine, or on the day of Dara's grandfather's funeral, when Dara was too young to remember anything except her grandmother's voice, steady as a bell, reading the psalm. It wavered now. "Fifteen years I've been afraid of the day you'd have to use what that man taught you. Fifteen years. I used to lie awake. I used to think, Lord, what have I done, I've taken a child with a temper and taught her how to hurt people. And then yesterday I watched that video and I thought, no. No, I didn't. I taught her how not to."
Dara put her free hand over her eyes.
"They suspended me, Grandma," she said. "From the trials. Somebody complained. A lot of somebodies. Coach says there's going to be a review. It might not be in time."
There was a silence on the line. Dara could hear, faintly, the kitchen radio in the house on Delmont Street playing gospel music, and the kettle beginning to sing.
"Then there'll be a review," said Odessa Whitfield, and her voice was steady as a bell again. "And you'll sit up straight and tell them the truth, the way I raised you, and you'll let them look at that long video, and if they've got any sense in their heads, which I'll grant you is not guaranteed with committees, they'll see what I saw. And if they don't, there'll be other trials. You're twenty-two. You're not done. You're not anywhere near done." A pause. "And Dara."
"Yes, ma'am?"
"Did you fill my tank?"
Dara stared out at the lake. Then, despite everything, she laughed. It came out of her in a startled, wet, helpless burst, the first time she had laughed since the rain.
"Not all the way," she said. "I got to five point nine gallons."