Clem saw her from the middle of the room. I watched it happen. My daughter stopped beside somebody's chair, with her hand still on their wrist, correcting their grip, and looked to the back corner, and saw who was sitting there, and saw how she was holding the pen. Her face didn't do anything. That's the thing about my daughter. It almost never does, when it counts.
Then she finished with the man whose wrist she was holding, and patted his shoulder, and walked to the back of the room, between the rows, past Yoshiko and Wynette and the Quisenberrys, who all turned to watch her go, until she was standing in front of the last chair in the corner.
Verlene looked up at her. Her hands had gone still around the pen. Not quiet, the way mine go. Just stopped.
Clem crouched down, so they were at eye level. She didn't say hello. She reached out and turned the trainer over in Verlene's hands, so the orange end pointed at the floor, and moved Verlene's thumb off the tip and wrapped her fingers around the middle of the barrel, one at a time, the way you'd fold the fingers of a child around a crayon.
"Fist around the middle," my daughter said. "Never put your thumb on either end. Blue to the sky."
Verlene looked down at her own hand on the pen. Then she looked at Clem. Her mouth moved, and nothing came out, and she tried again.
"And then?" she said.
Clem waited. Behind her the room had gone quiet, except for one last click somewhere up front, and then that stopped too. Archie had sat up on his yoga mat to see. Soledad had her hand on his back.
"You tell me," Clem said, and held out her own leg, and waited to see what the old woman would do.