Dee's eyes filled, which annoyed her, because she had a shift to finish and crying in a supply corridor was not on any list she had made. Rosa saw it and, in her mercy, pretended not to, and instead reached out and straightened Dee's collar with the brisk, maternal efficiency of a woman who has straightened ten thousand collars, and said, You eat before Saturday. Not that soup. Real food. And she went back down the corridor pushing her cart, the wheels sighing, the contract riding in her breast pocket over her heart like something she had won rather than been given, which, Dee thought, watching her go, was close enough to the truth to stand.
Carla's worry arrived the way Carla's worry always arrived, disguised as practicality. It came in lists texted at midnight after double shifts. Hydration. Sleep. Whether the medical on Saturday morning was a real medical or a televised one. Whether Sam Whitaker was the sort of referee who stopped things early or the sort who liked a story. Whether Blake's coach, Eddie Krol, had a reputation, and if so, for what. Dee answered each question as it came, sitting up in bed with the telephone's light on her face, and under the lists she could hear the other thing, the thing her daughter had been carrying since she was small and had first understood that her mother went out into the night and came home smelling of bleach and other people's buildings. So on Thursday Dee did something she rarely did. She finished her shift, changed, and drove to the hospital at the hour when the night staff took their meal break, and she sat with Carla in the staff canteen under lights that made everyone look tired and honest, and she ate the terrible canteen eggs because Carla had bought them, and she let her daughter look at her properly.
You are not going to talk me out of it, Dee said, gently, before Carla had finished arranging her face.
I know, Carla said. I have met you. She turned her cup in its saucer. I keep thinking about the seven seconds. Everybody talks about the seven seconds like they were the dangerous part. Mom, I work in a hospital. The dangerous part is not seven seconds. The dangerous part is a twenty seven year old who has been embarrassed on the internet spending a week deciding to hurt somebody to fix it. That is the part I keep seeing when I try to sleep.
Dee reached across the table and took her daughter's hand, which was warm and dry and competent, a nurse's hand, with the nails cut short and a wedding band she did not wear on shift riding on a chain against her scrubs. Carla had her father's steadiness and her mother's refusal to look away, and Dee loved her with the fierce, helpless completeness that does not diminish as children grow but only changes address.
Then look at the rest of it, she said. Not just at him. Look at the agreement. Look at who referees. Sam Whitaker has stopped championship rounds for less than a loose tooth, and half the sport dislikes him for it, which is how you know he is good. Look at the medicals, morning of, both of us, same doctor, and Yusuf has the right, written down, to walk out onto that mat and end my part of it with one word, and so does Eddie Krol for Blake, and men like Eddie do not keep that right in their pocket for decoration. And look at me, Carla. I am not going in there to be brave. Brave is for people who do not know the ground. I know the ground. I have been falling on that ground, on purpose, ten thousand times, since before Blake Rennert was born. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong in a room full of people whose whole job that night is to stop it going wrong. That is more safety than I have for crossing the parking lot at two in the morning, and you let me do that six nights a week.
Carla was quiet for a moment. Then she laughed, unwillingly, and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand in a gesture so exactly her mother's that they both noticed it and neither said so.