That is a terrible argument, she said. It is also the one that works. Okay. Okay. Then I have conditions.
Name them, Dee said, and Carla, who was her mother's daughter in all the ways that mattered, produced, from her pocket, an actual list, written on the back of a medication chart, and read it aloud in the canteen while the night staff pretended not to listen. Dee would eat on Saturday, twice, real food, one of them cooked by Carla. Dee would let Carla sit ringside and not in the cheap seats Simon had first offered, because if anything happened Carla intended to be close enough to be useful and not close enough to be in the way. Dee would come to Sunday lunch afterwards whatever happened, and would not be heroic about it, and if she was bruised she would say so and not perform being fine for an audience of her own family. And Dee would wear, under her gi, the old blue undershirt from her competing years, the one with the federation patch Carla had sewn back on at age fifteen with crooked, furious stitches, because some things, Carla said, folding the chart away, are not superstition. Some things are just bringing your whole life with you, so you remember not to spend it cheaply.
Dee agreed to all of it, and on the drive home in the dark she cried a little, briefly and without self pity, at a red light on Cerrillos Road, because there is a particular loneliness in being the person everyone else is brave about, and her daughter had just refused, in a canteen, with a list, to participate in it.
Blake Rennert gave his press session on Thursday afternoon in the main hall, sitting on the edge of the mat in a clean tracksuit with the belt laid across the table in front of him like a piece of evidence. Dee did not attend. She watched it later, at Yusuf's insistence, on the small television in the coaches' room while she ate the rice and beans Carla had packed for her in a container with her name written on the lid in marker, because Yusuf believed a fighter should hear the other person's week in their own words and not in the retelling of friends. Blake was, to her surprise, almost respectful. He had clearly been coached, and not only by Eddie. He said her name correctly, which three outlets had failed to do. He said she had been a serious athlete before she had been anything else in that building, and that the sport owed people like her more attention than it paid. He said the throw had been clean and that he was not going to insult anyone's intelligence by calling clean work lucky.
Then a voice off camera, young and pleased with itself, asked him how long Saturday would take, and the room changed temperature, and Dee watched the whole week happen again on a twenty seven year old face. She watched him enjoy being asked. She watched the champion come back up in him like weather. Quick, he said. I respect her, but levels are levels, and I am not planning to be out there long enough to get cold. Saturday ends early. That is not disrespect, that is arithmetic.
Jenna Park, sitting on the counter with a towel round her neck, snorted. Arithmetic, she said. He has been doing arithmetic all week. Somebody should tell him you are not a number.
He knows, Dee said. That is why he keeps saying it. A man does not repeat the thing he is sure of. He repeats the thing he is trying to make sure of.
Eddie Krol found his fighter an hour after the cameras left, in the empty hall, working the heavy bag with the tight, joyless rhythm of a man punishing an object for being available. Eddie was forty six, broad through the shoulders going soft at the edges, a former contender who had lost the two fights that mattered and had built a second life out of making sure other people did not lose them the same way. He had a trainer's economy of speech and a father's unwillingness to use it falsely, and he leaned against the ring post with his arms folded and watched a full round go by before he spoke.
You did well in there, he said. Up to the last answer.
Blake did not stop hitting the bag. The last answer was the one they came for.