Don't tell D till after. She'll want to come. She'll worry. This is HER day.
Tom sat on the bleacher in the Tacoma Dome with the noise of the boys' 190-pound final going on above him and read the paper a third time, and then he set it on his knee and stared at the gold mat without seeing it.
A cheek swab. A drive in the lobby of a gym in Pasco, years ago, for Coach Delgado's nephew. Lena coming back to the bleachers rubbing the inside of her cheek with her tongue. I got a call. I'll tell you about it sometime. And he had been in a bucket truck outside Naches and had never answered.
Somewhere tonight—in Seattle, or Atlanta, or some city across an ocean; Lena would probably never be told which—a sixteen-year-old girl he would never meet was lying in a hospital bed after days of chemotherapy so strong it had wiped out her own marrow completely, and a courier with a cooler was on his way to her, or already there, carrying something that had come out of his wife's bones this morning. And Lena was lying in a bed forty minutes north of here with her hips on fire, alone, or with Marisol from the dental office, who she'd known for two years—because she had written his name on the line, and then she had thought about it, and crossed it out.
"I took it," Rosie said in a small voice. "Yesterday. Before we left. It had Dani's name on it. And it was on the fridge, so it was important. And Mama was packing all her important stuff, and she forgot that one." She looked at her shoes. "I thought it was for Dani. I was going to give it to Dani. But then I read the bottom."
"You read it?"
"Some of it. I can read don't tell. And I can read Dani and after." She looked up at him, her eyes huge. "So I didn't tell. I waited till after. Was that right?"
Tom put his arm around her and pulled her against his side and held on.
"That was exactly right," he said. "That was exactly, exactly right."
"What does it say, though? The big words?"
He looked at the paper. He thought about how to say it to a seven-year-old. He thought about how to say it to himself.
"It says Mama went to the hospital today," he said slowly, "so a doctor could take a little bit of the stuff inside her bones. The stuff that makes blood. And they're going to give it to a girl who's very sick, whose own body stopped making it. A girl about Dani's age."
Rosie absorbed this. "Is Mama okay?"
"I think so. I think she's sore. I think she's going to be sore for a while."