"She's in the semis. She's got a real shot. You know she's got a real shot. You're the one who—" He stopped, because Rosie had stopped fiddling with her shoes and was watching them with the bright, still attention of a kid who has learned that grown-up voices can change temperature very fast. He lowered his voice. "You're the one who drove her to every tournament from here to Spokane for seven years. And you're going to miss the one that counts for a course?"
Lena stood up. She had a way of standing very straight when she was refusing to cry, and he had seen it maybe five times in eighteen years, and he saw it now and did not understand it.
"I already talked to Dani," she said. "She understands."
"Does she."
"Please just get her there. Please just be there. That's all I'm asking."
"I was always going to be there."
She looked at him then, a look that he would think about later, a look that seemed to contain an entire argument they had already had and that he had lost without knowing he was in it. Then she bent down and kissed Rosie on the top of her braid.
"Be good for Daddy. Tell your sister I love her. Tell her—" Her voice snagged. "Tell her to keep her hands busy."
"Hands are a conversation," Rosie recited.
"That's right, baby."
Tom picked up Rosie's lunchbox from the counter. Rosie went back to the fridge, as if she'd forgotten something there, and stood in front of it for a moment while Lena went to find her own car keys. Tom didn't watch her. He was looking at the little framed photograph on the windowsill above the sink, which was of Dani at eleven, gap-toothed and furious, holding a third-place medal from a youth tournament in Moses Lake. He had not been at that tournament. He had been in a bucket truck forty feet in the air outside Selah, in sleet, putting a town's lights back on. He had told himself at the time that this was a perfectly good reason, and it was. It was a perfectly good reason every time.
"Rosie. Let's go."
She came running, backpack bouncing, one hand jammed in the pocket of her puffy coat.
* * *
He dropped Rosie at Cutler Springs Elementary and drove to the Benton-Yakima PUD yard and spent the day replacing a run of rotten crossarms on a feeder line east of town, and every hour or so he took his phone out of his chest pocket and checked the state association's stream to see if the girls' 135-pound bracket had moved.
Dani won her first match by fall in a minute and forty seconds. Tom watched it on a four-inch screen with his climbing gaffs still strapped to his boots, standing in the slush beside the truck while Luis Ochoa ran the boom. On the tiny screen she looked like a different person from the girl who left wet towels on the bathroom floor. She looked compact and deliberate. She shot in on a single leg so fast the stream dropped frames.