"The coach asked me to come," she said.
Patricia moved her hand, not the way a slap is unkind, the way a door is shut while the handle is still in reach. "You can skip the audition. Your sister has pickers today. People are driving in from two schools. I am not spending the morning on a community-center favor so you can stand in the back and clap off the beat."
"It's not the community center."
"It is the same idea," Patricia said. "Someone being nice because your last name used to mean a man who showed up."
Audrey set the white shoe back into the tissue. "Pickers don't wait. If we're late they'll think we don't care, and then they'll write that down like it's a fact about me."
The word had been in the house for weeks, said the way other families said surgeon. Selectors. Recruiters. Women and men with lanyards who could look at a seventeen-year-old's turnout and start a conversation that ended, if you were lucky and expensive and unbroken, in a letter. Audrey kept a board in her room with three school crests printed at the library and a column labeled what they want. Willa had seen it when she went in for a hair tie and was told, without heat and without welcome, to get out.
She pulled the lace through. Her hands knew the knot. She had tied these shoes in the dark more mornings than she had eaten breakfast at the table. The left lace was shorter than the right because she had tripped on the river path in September and cut it on a stick, then burned the end with a match from the junk drawer so it would not unravel all the way to nothing.
A car door sounded at the curb. Not theirs. Theirs sat in the drive with a cold engine, Patricia's good tote already in the passenger seat, Audrey's garment bag and the folder of headshots Audrey pretended not to need.
The bell rang.
Patricia frowned as if the house had spoken out of turn. "If that is a package, leave it."
Willa did not get up to answer. She finished the bow. Double knot. The way Sam Keene had taught her on the back steps the week the shoes were new, when new still meant factory smell and not a private fact. He had knelt, bad knee cracking, and said, Don't yank. You yank, you make a knot that hates you later. Invite it through.
She stood. From above, the brown shoes looked worse. She could see the place on the right toe where the canvas had thinned to its weave.