Not the lawsuit in full detail. Not the cease and desist. Not specific mechanics of what Latimore was trying to build. Just the shape of it. The hearing postponed.
The scholarship still frozen. The feeling of being pressed from every direction by something that had more resources than she did and was not particularly worried about being fair. Divine listened without interrupting, which was its own kind of love. After dinner, Zoe sat in Grandpa Robert's chair. It lived in the corner of the living room between the bookshelf and the window.
A wide armchair in dark brown fabric that had gone soft and slightly shapeless over the years from the particular weight of one particular person sitting in it for decades. They had kept it after he passed 3 years ago because getting rid of it had not felt like something either of them was ready to do. And the years had made it feel less like absence and more like presence. Like he had just stepped out and would be back shortly. Zoe sat in it and held the photograph from her backpack in both hands.
Robert at the 1987 tournament. That grin. Those raised arms. She thought about what Takahashi had said on the mat. He competed at nationals.
He was extraordinary. She thought about the 11 years she had spent training with him in the small gym he ran out of a rented space on Fairburn Road. The smell of the mats and the squeak of her sneakers and his voice counting repetitions from the corner. She thought about how he had never once said the word nationals. Never mentioned 1987.
Never offered it as context or credential or reason she should listen to him. He had just showed up every time and taught her. She could not sleep. At 11:30, she got up, moved quietly through the dark apartment, and found herself in front of the closet in the hallway where Divine kept boxes of things that did not have another home. She wasn't sure what she was looking for.
She pulled the chain on the overhead bulb and started moving boxes. She found it in the third one. A shoe box inside a larger box of Robert's competition things. Ribbons, programs, handwritten training notes in his small cramped script. Inside the shoe box, folded once, a letter on the letterhead of a regional training center in Macon, Georgia, dated 11 years ago.
The director thanking Robert Okerson personally and at length for years of quiet advocacy for young athletes who had no institutional support, no financial resources, and nowhere else to go. For making phone calls, for showing up, for doing it without recognition or compensation