"The rule matters, Carla."
"The rule matters, and also you are the only woman in New Mexico who could have had anything and asked for an announcement." There was the warm clatter of a hospital kitchen in the background; Carla was on a break in the middle of a night shift of her own, nurse's shifts being, as she often observed, the family trade in a better uniform. "I'm proud of you. I want that on the record before I say the next part, which is that I am also frightened, in a way I have been working on not showing you. You're forty-eight. Your shoulder is the one from the silver final and it talks to you every winter. I set bones for a living now, more or less, I at least stand next to people who do, and I know what a motivated twenty-seven-year-old champion is, physically, in a way your Yusuf possibly does not want to."
"Yusuf knows. Yusuf has said it once, plainly, as agreed, and I said no, as agreed."
"That's not a medical system, Mum, that's a folk tale."
"There is an actual doctor, Carla. From Las Cruces. He does not work for the club. He has examined me already once and will again, and he said words I will treasure, which were, and I quote, unremarkable for your age and history, except the grip strength, which is absurd. Absurd, from a doctor. I may have it put on a shirt." She heard her daughter laugh, unwillingly and then properly, and the laugh did what laughs between them had done since Carla was nine and keeping a brave face about a grazed knee in a car park: it lowered the whole conversation by one necessary degree. "I raised you not to perform bravery, and I am not performing it. I am frightened of exactly two things. Hurting him badly, which I will not do, because Sam will be there and because I do not hurt people badly, it is not my style of judo and never was. And the other thing—" She folded the last shirt. "Making my people into a story. The cleaners. They did not ask to be a condition in a contract. Rosa cried when Jenna told her, and I had to sit with that, because Rosa crying with gratitude about a pay review that hasn't happened yet is a picture of how low the bar has been set for us, and I do not enjoy being the woman who set it one inch higher and got thanked. So we do the bout properly, we fill the fund, Simon does his review and signs it where they can see it, and then I go back to being Rosa's colleague who is good at the drains. That's the whole ambition. It's not much of a highlight reel."
"It is a considerably better ambition than his," Carla said. "I've seen his folder. A patient showed me. Half the ward has seen his folder, Mum, that's rather the problem for him, isn't it. All right. I surrender on the medicine, conditionally, which runs in the family. I'll be there. Front row. With Yusuf's towel if he'll share it, and a professional interest in everybody's neck, and I will shout exactly once, because I am my mother's daughter and once is accurate."
The formal signing took place in Simon's office on the Friday, with Sam Whitaker present because Dee had asked for him and Sam had agreed to referee only after reading the conditions himself, twice, in his slow referee's way, and announcing that condition two was the first bout document in thirty years of officiating that treated his job as something other than scenery. Sam was fifty, broad and quiet, a former wrestler himself who had become the referee fighters asked for when they wanted the bout and not the theatre, and he read the tap rules aloud in the office, unprompted, in exactly the voice he would use in the hall, so that everyone present heard how final they sounded when a man like Sam said them: that a tap ended everything at once, that a verbal submission ended everything at once, that a corner's word ended everything at once, and that a hold was released the instant any of those things happened, without finishing, without emphasis, without a parting message of any kind.
"That's how it will be in there," Sam said, "whoever it's holding whom. I've stopped a title bout at eight seconds for less than I'm describing, and been booed out of a hall in Amarillo for my trouble, and I sleep beautifully. Sign here."