Thank you, Dee said, and pulled the new hair tie once through her fingers to test it, and thought that whatever the evening held, it had already produced this, her daughter standing in a warm up room doorway choosing honesty in the middle of her own fear, and that a life which produced such moments could afford whatever a mat decided to add to them.
Then the undercard was done, and the hall changed key, the way halls do, a settling, a gathering, the two thousand small noises of a crowd becoming one listener. The ring announcer, a local radio man who had promised Simon, on paper, at Dee's end of the table, that there would be no jokes about cleaning, read the scholarship total one final time, fifty eight thousand four hundred dollars and rising, and the names of the evening's officials, and Dee heard her own breathing and found it where she had left it, low and unhurried, and Yusuf, at her shoulder, did not offer a last word, because he had given the last word at dawn over oranges and bread and had the discipline to let it stand. Jenna touched her shoulder once, briefly, in the place where the taping finished. Carla, from her seat, did not wave. She lifted her chin, a small, exact gesture the two of them had shared across hospital car parks and school stages and one airport, which meant, I am here, and I am looking, and you do not have to look back to know it.
Sam Whitaker walked to the centre of the mat in his black shirt with his whistle in his hand and his fifty years arranged around him like a good suit, and the announcer's voice went out over the hall, and Dolores Marenco walked out of the warm up room doorway and across the floor she had cleaned at midnight a thousand times, in her bare feet, in a white gi, with her whole life under it in an old blue shirt, to the place where she was called. The roar found her and she let it pass over her the way she had let weather pass over her all week. At the other edge of the mat Blake Rennert came out with Eddie Krol a half step behind him and no belt in his hands and his face set in an expression the cameras would spend all night trying to name, and the two of them met Sam in the middle, where the light was brightest and the floor she knew by heart gave, softly and exactly as expected, under her feet.
Sam looked at each of them in turn, at the champion of twenty seven and at the woman of forty eight, and he recited the rules the way he recited them for every pair who ever stood in front of him, without hurry and without theatre, because Yusuf had once told Dee that a referee's rules, spoken properly, are a kind of blessing a secular room allows itself. The tap ends it. A hand, a foot, a voice, any of them, and it is over in that instant, and the release will be immediate or the evening will be. His hand over either corner ends it. His word ends it. He would be watching the faces and not the story. He asked if they understood, and Dee said she understood, and Blake Rennert, after the smallest pause in which a whole week seemed to stand up and sit down again, said that he understood too. Around them the Copperline Athletic Club, two thousand people, Rosa Delgado with her name in large letters, Carla with her chin lifted, Jenna standing now, Yusuf at the mat's edge with his hands folded and his lesson already given, went utterly, completely quiet, and in that quiet Dee could hear the building itself, the canvas, the lights, her own heart going about its work at its own unhurried pace, entirely on time.