"That your kid?" Luis asked, leaning out of the cab.
"That's my kid."
"Damn. She's going to end somebody."
"She ended her," Tom said, and showed him the replay, and felt something swell in his chest that was so close to pride and so close to grief that he couldn't sort one from the other.
She won her quarterfinal by decision, 7–2, at a quarter to five, while Tom sat in the cab of his own truck in the PUD lot with the heater running and his hands still black from creosote. He texted her, PROUD OF YOU. SEE YOU TOMORROW. ROSIE AND ME LEAVING AT 4. She texted back a thumbs-up and, a minute later, did mom say anything to u.
He looked at that for a long time.
She said she's sorry she can't come, he wrote. He sat with his thumb over the button for a long time, trying to think of a better way to say it, and there wasn't one, so he sent it as it was.
k, Dani wrote.
That was all. One letter. He knew that letter. It was the letter he used to send Lena from a hotel in Wenatchee during a storm callout, when she texted to tell him Rosie had a fever of 103, or that the dishwasher had flooded, or that Dani had been seeded first in a tournament he wouldn't make. It was the letter for I heard you and I have nothing left to say about it.
That night he packed a bag for Rosie with the care of a man defusing something: two changes of clothes, her stuffed walrus, her noise-canceling headphones because the Tacoma Dome would be loud, snacks in labeled bags because Lena always labeled the snacks. He made a sign out of a pizza box and a Sharpie that said GO DANI #135 and then looked at it and felt foolish and almost threw it away. He put it in the truck instead.
Before bed, Rosie stood in the kitchen of the house that had once been her mother's house too and studied their own refrigerator, which was mostly empty of papers now. There was a magnet from a pizza place. There was Dani's bracket from regionals, printed out and stuck on crooked. There was a drawing Rosie had made in October of a family of four stick people under a sun with a face, and Tom had never taken it down, and had never been able to look at it directly either.
"Why doesn't our fridge have as many papers as Mama's?" Rosie asked.
"I guess Mama's more organized."