"Hear what."
"The room. The music. Yourself not lying."
Willa pressed her thumb into the center of her other palm, a habit from counting. "My mom thinks it's a favor."
"Your mom can think what she thinks from the other side of the river," Coach Moretti said. "I'm not here to litigate your kitchen. I'm here because the school asked, and because you keep showing up at hours that are inconvenient to everyone, including me, and doing the work. That's the whole sermon. It was short on purpose."
Willa almost laughed and caught it, because laughing felt like spending something. "The video. I didn't know."
"I should have told you the day I sent it. I waited because I didn't want to put a hope in your week if they said no. That was me managing you without asking. I'm sorry."
The apology sat between them, plain, not decorated. Willa did not know what to do with an adult apology that did not ask her to make it smaller. She said, "Okay," and then, because it was not enough, "I would have wanted to know. Even if they said no."
"Noted," the coach said. "Next time, you know."
They crossed the bridge. The river was the color of a nickel and moved like it had business. Willa thought of her father on this bridge with the windows down in March, the year the shoes were new, singing badly to a song on the radio and tapping the wheel on the two and the four. He had bought the sneakers at the hardware store on a Tuesday because her school pair had split at the playground and she had asked, small and embarrassed, whether she could try the gym floor after last period if she had something that would not fall off. He had looked at the rack by the register, the cheap canvas ones in a row like they were sorry to be there, and said, These will do the job. We don't need them to make a speech.
He was dead before the next winter. A Tuesday again, because the week had a sense of humor she did not forgive. An aneurysm, the doctor said, a word that sounded like a machine and meant there had not been time to be brave in the right order. Patricia had become, in the months after, a woman who could not stand an unplanned hour. Audrey had become the plan. Willa had become the walk to school, the dishes, the child who did not cost a costume deposit.
She did not tell the coach all of that. The car was warm now. The shoes were dry. Some stories, if you opened them before a floor, took the spring out of your knees.
"My dad bought them," she said anyway. It came out shorter than the memory. "The shoes. At the hardware store. He said they didn't have to make a speech."