"Mama taught me. In the car. Takedown is three. Escape is one. Reversal is two. If you put them on their back it's nearfall, and that's two or three or four, depends on how long you count. And a pin is you win, the end." She settled back against him. "Mama says you can tell somebody loves you if they learn the rules of your thing."
He didn't say anything to that.
Dani won the semifinal 7–3. She rode the Spokane girl for most of the second period and escaped in the third and got another takedown with eleven seconds left off a low single leg that Tom only understood afterward, when he watched the replay on his phone in the concourse with Rosie leaning against his hip, explaining it.
Then Dani turned around and looked up into the stands. Tom raised his hand to wave. But she wasn't looking for him; he could tell. Her eyes went past him, past Rosie and the sign, to a spot higher up—to the very top rows behind mat seven, up near the concourse railing, where the seats were half empty—and stayed there for a second, searching, and then came back down.
"What's she looking at?" Tom said.
"Mama always sits at the top," Rosie said. "So Dani always knows where to look. It's a rule."
* * *
Between the semis and the finals there were five hours, while the Dome was emptied and the floor rebuilt for the championship round. He bought Rosie a hot dog and a lemonade and himself a coffee that tasted like it had been brewed in a radiator, and they sat in the concourse on a bench by a window streaked with rain, and he tried to figure out how to fill the time.
Dani found them there around noon. She'd changed into sweats and a gray hoodie and had her hair down for the first time all day, wet from the shower, and she was carrying a paper boat of plain white rice and a banana.
"Is that all you're eating?" Tom asked.
"It's what I eat." She sat down on the other side of Rosie and peeled the banana. "I'm on at around six. I can't eat real food till after."
"Your mom used to pack you—" He stopped.
"Rice and a banana," Dani said. "Yeah."
They sat. Rosie stole a piece of rice off Dani's paper boat and ate it with ceremonial slowness, watching her sister to see if she'd be stopped. She wasn't.
"Who've you got in the final?" Tom asked.
Dani gave him a look.
"I'm asking," he said. "I want to know."
She seemed to weigh that. "Mia Castellanos," she said. "Harbor Ridge. She's a senior. She's won it twice."
"Have you wrestled her before?"
"Last year. In the semis." Dani pulled a string of banana off and dropped it in the rice. "She tech-falled me."