One was the fifth chair, with the tape still on its back.
The other was Renee's.
So she left, Nora thought, with a coldness that surprised her. She tore it up and then she left. She couldn't even sit through it. And she was ashamed of how much it hurt, how her eyes went straight to that empty chair and stayed there, the way your tongue goes to the place a tooth used to be.
She began.
"In the winter of 1805," she said, "Meriwether Lewis and William Clark built a fort seven miles from where we're sitting, and for the next hundred and six days, it rained on them."
Laughter, warm and immediate. It was a good line. It was a line for a town that had lived its whole life under clouds.
"It rained on them so much," she went on, "that Clark wrote in his journal, and I'm quoting, 'O! how horriable is the day.' He spelled horrible with an i-a. I want you all to know that one of the greatest explorers in American history could not spell horrible, and he still made it to the Pacific." More laughter. Coach Okafor shook his head, grinning. "But I'm not here to talk about Lewis and Clark. I'm here to talk about the bar."
She knew this speech. She could have said it in her sleep. She talked about the mouth of the Columbia, where the whole weight of the river runs headlong into the whole weight of the Pacific and the sand piles up underneath and the waves stand up forty feet tall. She said, "My dad is a bar pilot," and saw her father lift his head, and she said that every day, men and women like him climbed rope ladders up the sides of moving ships in the dark to bring them safely across, and that leaving home was like that, and that every one of them had had someone who knew the water. Someone who climbed up the ladder for them.
She was almost to the joke about the sea lions when the doors at the back of the gym opened.
They were the big double doors under the scoreboard, at the far end of the court, behind the last row of folding chairs and the standing families with their phones. Nobody used them during the ceremony. They opened inward with a clank of push-bars, and gray daylight came in, and the sound of the rain, and two women came through them, soaked to the skin.
At that distance, under those lights, Nora could not see their faces at first. She could only see that one was holding the other by the elbow. That they had been running. That one of them, the taller one, was in a dark green rain shell with the hood fallen back and dark hair coming loose and plastered to her neck, and that the other, the smaller one, the one holding on, was in a ruined navy blazer with her hair in her eyes, and had a hand pressed flat against her chest the way she did when she was out of breath, the way she had done at the top of the bleachers at every single cross-country meet Nora had ever run, the way Nora would have known anywhere, in any light, from any distance at all.