Dee looked at him for a long moment. He was sixty-eight, tall gone slightly stooped, his hair entirely white and cut close, his hands unhurried. He had buried a wife and retired from a university programme and come to San Tomas for the dry air his doctor prescribed, and for nine years he had been the man at Copperline who fixed judgements quietly, who told a young wrestler his stance was an apology, who once made Blake Rennert, at nineteen and newly arrogant, run the hall steps until the arrogance was too tired to speak. Blake had never forgiven the steps, and had never forgotten them either, which Yusuf counted, Dee knew, as a complete success.
"On one condition," Dee said, and Yusuf's mouth twitched.
"Everyone in this building has conditions now. It is spreading from you like a cough."
"You don't train me. You don't remake me. You watch, you advise, you hold the towel, and if you think I should stop, you say so once, plainly, and if I say no and Sam hasn't stopped it, you support the no. I'm not a girl you're bringing along. I'm a woman hiring a second."
"Hiring," Yusuf said. "For what fee?"
"The truth, between rounds, in a voice that doesn't panic."
"That is a high fee. I accept." He nodded toward the mats. "Then show me, not the seven seconds. Any fool can show a finish. Show me the minute before a finish. Show me your feet."
So she showed him her feet. They worked the way she had worked alone for years and found, both of them, almost at once, that working not-alone was a different discipline: Yusuf named things she had stopped naming decades ago, called her grip fighting lazy in one specific exchange and excellent in three others, made her repeat a transition eleven times not because it was wrong but because it was right and he wanted to see whether it stayed right when she was tired. Jenna arrived at five with her bag over her shoulder and stopped in the doorway at the sight of the two of them, the janitor and the retired coach, circling each other in the grey light like figures in an old photograph.
"Nobody tells me anything," Jenna said.
"You are told everything," Dee said, breathing hard, "at the time it's useful. Get on the mat. I need a body that isn't sixty-eight and precious."
Jenna, who at twenty-six had the strong, springy, forgiving body of a woman who had come to grappling from college rugby and stayed for the chess of it, got on the mat with the air of a person accepting an honour, and for forty minutes she was thrown, carefully and without malice and in complete technical silence except for Yusuf's voice, in nearly every direction the human body can be thrown. It was in a rest between rounds, sitting on the mat edge with their legs out and a water bottle passing between them, that Jenna finally asked the question Dee could hear her assembling.
"Tell me about the medal," she said. "Not the clip version. I've heard the clip version in the canteen and it's already got a soundtrack. Tell me about actually."
"The bronze," Dee said.
"There's only one medal, Dee. People keep saying medal like there's a cabinet."
"There nearly was a cabinet," Dee said, and was surprised, as she sometimes still was, by how little it hurt to say. "I was twenty-three the year of the bronze. Nationals, in a hall in Colorado Springs with a leaking roof, in February. It rained inside, a little, in one corner, and they put a bucket there and nobody moved the bucket all weekend; you could hear it during the quiet matches, ping, ping, like the hall was keeping time. I lost my semi-final to a woman named Okafor who was simply better than me, the best I ever faced, she threw me with a foot sweep so clean I thanked her while I was still falling, which she said afterwards was the strangest thing anyone had ever done to her in a final. She won the gold. I won the bronze match in the last forty seconds with a hold-down, which is the least beautiful way to win anything in judo, lying on somebody with all your weight and your heart slamming while a referee counts, and I did not care in the slightest about beautiful. I stood on the third step of the podium with wet hair, because there had been no time to dry it, and a borrowed tracksuit top, because mine had torn in the semi-final and nobody from my club could afford the official one, and I remember thinking two things, very clearly, one after the other. The first was: next year the second step. And the second was: I must phone home and tell my mother before the results get to her from somebody else, because she worried the phone bill for a month if she thought I'd been hurt and hadn't called."