Saturday evening came up golden and then blue over San Tomas, and the Copperline Athletic Club filled the way a church fills for a wedding somebody has waited years for, in layers of noise and good clothes and anticipation. By six the lobby was impassable. By six thirty the scholarship board by the entrance, which Jenna had painted by hand in white on black with a column for the running total, read forty four thousand, and a cheer went up each time the number changed, for a matched donation, for the auction table, for a local garage whose owner had trained at the club in the eighties and had sent a cheque with a note that said, for the falling lessons, which Carla read aloud twice. The air smelled of canvas and citrus cleaner and the coffee urn in the cafe and the particular electricity of two thousand people deciding, together, to pay attention to the same small square of the world. Rosa Delgado sat in the third row in a blue dress Dee had never seen her wear to the building, with her new badge, absurdly and wonderfully, pinned to the strap of her good handbag, her whole name in coach sized letters catching the light whenever she moved, and beside her sat three of the fourteen signatories, dressed for an occasion, holding programmes they had no intention of reading, because they knew the running order by heart and had opinions about all of it.
Dee watched the undercard from the doorway of the warm up room, where she could see without being seen, with her hands loose at her sides and her breathing doing its slow, unremarkable work. Yusuf had taught her long ago that a fighter who watches the early bouts properly learns the evening's temperature, and the evening, she was pleased and quietly proud to see, was a clean one, because the club had set its terms and the terms had held. In the first bout a twenty four year old featherweight from the valley, quick as a rumour, caught an arm in the third minute and the arm's owner tapped twice, hard and clear, and the hold was gone before the second tap had finished sounding, released as if the arm had become fire, and the two of them were on their feet and embracing before Sam Whitaker had finished stepping between them out of a referee's habit. The crowd, which had come partly for a spectacle, learned its part early and learned it well. It applauded the release as loudly as the catch. Dee saw Sam notice it too, and file it, the way referees file everything.
The second bout went the distance, two brown belts, a man of thirty one and a woman of twenty nine, circling through three long, patient passages of grip and counter grip that the knowledgeable rows watched with held breath and the new rows watched with the dawning respect of people discovering that slowness, in the right hands, is not the absence of action but the price of it. It ended on points, narrowly, and the loser raised the winner's hand herself before the officials thought to, and Carla, ringside in her good seat with Jenna beside her, turned and found her mother's eyes across the hall with an expression that said, I see it. I see what this actually is. The third bout was shorter and sharper. A twenty six year old from Albuquerque, in the club as a guest, was caught in a leg entanglement by one of Simon's own heavyweights and tapped once, verbally as well, a clear, unembarrassed word, and was free of it in the same instant, the hold unwinding with a care that Dee, watching, rated as the finest technique of the night so far. Nobody laughed. Nobody booed a quick finish. The scholarship board turned over to fifty one thousand during the interval and the roar for a number on a board, for other people's children and their bus passes and their falling lessons, was the loudest sound the Copperline had made all year, and Simon Greer stood by the board with his hand over his mouth like a man at a birth.
In the warm up room the noise came through the wall as weather. Jenna helped her with her belt and did not speak while she did it, out of a tact Dee had not taught her and valued accordingly. Carla came in once, carrying a container and a look that brooked nothing, and watched her mother eat half a portion of rice and chicken sitting on a bench in her gi, and then produced, from her own pocket, a hair tie, because the one Dee was wearing had begun, under scrutiny, to fray, and a daughter who is a nurse does not send her mother anywhere with equipment that might fail at a load bearing moment. Blake Rennert, she reported, in the neutral tones of a woman delivering a clinical observation, is in the corridor doing his breathing. His coach is not letting the cameras in. She hesitated. He asked the usher where your warm up room was. The usher did not tell him. I thought you should know he asked, that is all. I did not think you should have to wonder whether I would tell you things.