Blake did not go to his corner. He did not go to the cameras, which were there, leaning in, hungry for the shape of defeat they knew how to sell. He held out his hand to the announcer with a plainness that silenced the first rows, and then, by example, all the others, and the microphone came to him with its long cord trailing across the mat she had cleaned that morning. He stood in the middle of the Copperline with his hair dark with sweat and his jacket crooked and his defeat complete and public, and he did the hardest thing he had done all night, which was to speak accurately.
"Everybody keeps saying seven seconds," he said. "Seven seconds, like she caught me. Like it was weather." He shook his head. The hall was silent in the way it had been silent before Sam started them, but fuller. "She did not beat me in seven seconds tonight." He looked at the clock, and then he looked at her, standing a pace away with her hands at her sides and her old shoulder riding a little high, exactly as it always did, win or lose. "She beat me in eleven minutes and forty seconds, and it was not luck in any one of them. She was better in the first minute, when I was scoring. She was better in the fifth, when I thought I had her finished. She was better at the end, when there was nothing left of me to be better with." He turned then, fully, and faced her, and raised the microphone slightly, not for the hall but so the hall could hear what he owed. "Coach," he said. "Thank you for the lesson, Coach."
Dee stood in the noise that followed with her hands still at her sides, because she did not know a gesture for what she felt and was not a woman who borrowed gestures. What she felt, when she examined it later that night at her kitchen table with Carla asleep-in-everything-but-name on the couch across the room, was not triumph, exactly. Triumph was a flavour she remembered from being twenty and it had been sweet and brief. This was quieter and it went deeper. It was the feeling of a room finally describing her correctly. She had been described incorrectly in that building for years, in the friendly, incurious way that people describe furniture, and she had borne it the way she bore most things, by working, but she understood now that bearing a thing is not the same as being free of its weight. When Blake Rennert called her Coach in front of the town, the weight came off, and it did not come back.
The weeks after the bout were, in their ordinary way, stranger than the bout itself. The video of the exhibition did what the first video had done, only further; there were journalists, and a television crew from Albuquerque who wanted her to stand holding a mop in the doorway of the club, a request she declined with a courtesy so complete that it took the producer a full day to realise he had been refused. The club's board met twice. Money that had been promised in the loose, warm language of sponsors on good nights was, for once, collected in full, because Simon Greer, to his own visible surprise, had become a zealot on the subject of paying what the night had owed. The scholarship fund was launched in the spring with Blake's name and the club's name on the paperwork and Dee's name nowhere on it at her insistence, and then, at Blake's insistence, read out loud at the launch anyway, in a clause naming the fund's first awards for students who worked nights, cleaned buildings, raised families, rode buses, and studied or trained in the hours other people were asleep. The first two awards went to a nursing aide who had wanted for six years to finish her qualifications and to a young man from the south side who folded towels at a hotel laundry and had a wrestler's build and a librarian's patience, and Dee was present for neither presentation, because she had asked not to be, and sent, instead, a note to each of them in her small exact handwriting. It said: the hours are yours. Spend them like they count, because they do.