It wasn't perfect. It wandered a little to the left. But it held.
"There," Lena said.
* * *
A week later, on a Sunday evening, Dani came into the kitchen of the house on Alder Street to get a glass of milk and found her father standing in front of the refrigerator with a roll of tape.
Her mother was still living in the apartment above the pharmacy. That hadn't changed. She was walking without the cane now, mostly, and she'd gone back to work on Thursday against everybody's advice, and on Saturday the four of them had eaten dinner together at the Mexican place on Third Street for the first time since summer, which had been strange and quiet and good.
The fridge had more papers on it now. There was a newspaper clipping from the Yakima Herald with a photo of Dani on the podium. There was a printout of the final bracket, with her name on the top line. There was a thank-you card from the registry addressed to Lena, which said the recipient's transplant had gone forward and that donors could request a progress update after ninety days and might, after a year, if both parties agreed, exchange letters. Lena had brought it over and stuck it up herself.
And there was the paper. Rosie's paper. Unfolded and smoothed flat, gray at the creases, with the crossed-out name and the circled date and This is HER day underlined twice at the bottom, held up under the strawberry magnet that Lena had brought from her own fridge, because, she said, it belonged with this.
Her father was taping up something new next to it. Dani came closer to look. It was next season's schedule—summer freestyle, then the high school calendar, November through February, every dual and tournament and the regional and the state finals—and down the margin, in his blocky, all-capitals handwriting, he'd written beside every single date: OFF — REQUESTED. A few of them said OFF — APPROVED. One, in January, had a big question mark and the words TRADE W/ LUIS.
"Dad," Dani said.
He finished the last strip of tape and stepped back and looked at it, and at the paper beside it, and at Rosie's October drawing of four stick people under a smiling sun, which was still there in the corner where it had always been.
"Your sister says if it's on the fridge, it's important," he said. "So you don't forget."
Dani put her arm through his. They stood there together, looking.
"She's right," Dani said.
"She usually is," her father said, and reached over, and straightened the schedule, so that it hung exactly level, right beside the paper that had been on the fridge.