The card said, in fourteen handwritings, We will be watching with our names on. Dee read it standing at her locker at the end of her Friday shift, in her cleaning clothes, with her cart beside her and the corridor smelling of pine solution and rain from the opened back door, and she put it in her pocket next to Rosa's example, because there are documents a person carries into a hard evening the way other people carry photographs, and hers, she had begun to understand, were all written by women the world addressed as the lady.
Simon Greer waylaid her before she left, holding two printed programmes and wearing the expression of a man who has good news he does not wholly trust himself to deliver. The scholarship fund, he said. You should know before tomorrow. We passed forty thousand last night. Corporate match came in from the Delgado family businesses, no relation to Rosa, Rosa wants it noted she did not marry money. If Saturday sells out, and it has, Simon. It sold out on Wednesday. Then with the auction of the signed belt, which Blake donated, whatever else he is, the boy donated his own belt to your school fund, Dee, we land somewhere near sixty. Sixty thousand dollars for kids from the east side and the valley who want to train and cannot pay. That is four years of fees. That is shoes and gis and bus passes. He held out a programme. They printed Carla's name right, as well. Ringside, with Jenna. I checked three times.
Thank you, Simon, Dee said, and meant several things by it, and he, to his credit, heard several things in it.
Her last dawn session came on Saturday, and she very nearly did not go. She woke at four thirty in the dark of her own house with her heart already working and lay listening to the pipes and the sparrows beginning in the eave, and understood that what she felt was not fear of Blake or of the crowd or of the cameras that would be waiting with their lights like a second, harsher morning. It was the old, pre competition feeling she had not had in twenty years and had once known better than her own address, the feeling of a day that had been pointed at for too long finally arriving, with nowhere left to put it except through her body. She got up. She ate standing at the counter, eggs and toast and the coffee Carla would have called inadequate and Yusuf would have called American. She put the old blue undershirt in her bag on top of her gi, where she could see the crooked patch without touching it, and she drove through the empty, rinsed streets to the Copperline, where the hall was dark and the door was locked, and Yusuf Adeyemi was waiting inside with the lights already on and the mats already out, at sixty eight years of age having arrived before her, as he had arrived before her at every threshold that mattered since she was a girl with a wrongly tied belt in another country of her life.
You are late, he said, which was his oldest joke, since she was twenty minutes early.
I am old, she said. I move at the speed of the truth now.
Then we have all morning, he said, and smiled, and the session began the way all their sessions had begun since she came back to the mat with a cleaner's hands and a champion's past and no idea which of them she was allowed to be. They did not drill the throw. The throw, Yusuf said, was a door she already owned, and a person does not practise opening her own front door on the morning of a journey. They walked the mat together instead. They did footwork patterns at the pace of a conversation, the old geometries, step and turn and step, her feet remembering conversations her mind had long ago stopped needing to translate. They did falling, because falling was the first language and would be the last, and Dee fell a dozen times each way and rose each time with the unhurried competence that had once been her trademark on three continents, and Yusuf corrected nothing, which told her more about his assessment of her readiness than any praise he might have composed.