The medal looked less official in the morning. Lucy had hung it from the handle of her dresser, where the stamped gold circle turned whenever she opened a drawer. She was sitting on the floor in yesterday’s clean blue shirt, watching a recording of the final on her laptop with the sound off.
“Darnell sent it at midnight,” she told Nora. “The camera keeps finding his father’s head.”
Nora sat on the edge of the bed. Onscreen, Lucy made the face she had made before taking the attendance sheet from the other team: alert and faintly offended that the question needed asking. “You were good,” Nora said.
“I know.” Lucy paused the video. “I don’t want Sam at practice next week.”
“All right.”
“He might say sorry and then ask again. I don’t want you to say yes because he said sorry.”
“I won’t.” Nora looked at the frozen screen. “He came by after we got home. I told him you didn’t want him at the celebration. He stayed outside.”
“Why didn’t he call?”
Nora had lain awake with that answer, trying not to make it kinder or uglier than it was. “Ben’s apartment flooded, and June needed Sam to take her out while Ben dealt with the water. He went to June. Before he drove, he knew he would miss your final and had time to send us a message. He didn’t. He said he couldn’t bear to tell another child he’d broken a promise.”
Lucy looked at her. “He could bear to let me find out by looking at a chair.”
“Yes.”
“Is June okay?”
“She is. Ben picked her up later.”
“Good.” Lucy let the video run again, still silent. “I’m not mad he went to her. I would have gone to her. Even if she thinks train stations have soup roofs.”
Nora smiled and then stopped smiling. “I know.”
“You sound like you might make an argument for him.”
“I don’t have one for the silence.”
Lucy clicked the laptop shut. “Do you still like him?”
The question came without a trap in it, though Nora was tempted to answer as if she were on a witness stand. “Yes. I’m angry with him, and I still like him.”
“That’s complicated for you.”
“It is.”
“It doesn’t have to be complicated for me. I can just not have him at practice.” Lucy turned the medal so it faced outward. “Imani’s brother said he’ll be a judge for us next week. He won’t know any of our jokes.”
Nora asked whether the brother had been warned. Lucy said he had agreed before he saw the video. They watched the clip again with sound. Nora heard her own small intake of breath when Lucy found the temporary-room figure. Lucy laughed at it, not unkindly, and played that part twice.
Downstairs, Sam had sent one message to Nora at eight: Ben and June are staying with Ben’s friend until the kitchen wiring is checked. I saw them this morning. I owe Lucy an apology, if she wants one. I don’t want you to make her read it. Nora showed Lucy the message after breakfast, without asking her to answer.
“He can write one,” Lucy said. “Short. I don’t want a present or a speech about how awful he feels.”
Nora typed what Lucy had said, then let Lucy see it before sending. Sam replied that he would keep it short. He did not add a question about Nora.
Lucy took the medal to the kitchen while she called Imani. She wanted to meet at the park for an hour with the team, no adults to discuss judging or absence. Nora agreed to drive her, then found she had forty minutes before leaving. She tried to repair the hem of the curtain she’d washed Thursday. The stitches wandered. She pulled them out and put the needle away.
Paul texted while she was looking for her keys: Saw the team photo. Proud of Lucy. Could I call her tonight? Nora handed Lucy the phone in the car. Lucy read, then opened her own thread with Paul. She wrote that the team had won, that she would call Sunday afternoon, and that he should ask her about the attendance sheet. Nora did not hear whether Paul answered before Lucy ran to her friends.
The park had a low wall beside the courts. Nora stayed long enough to see all three teammates arrive, then drove home. On the way, she passed Sam’s street without intending to. She knew the turn because he had pointed out the old brick workshop he once rented there, back when he tried to repair every machine himself. Her hand moved toward the signal and then away. She had two hours alone, and she did not owe them to the hardest conversation available.
At home she ate leftover cake from the cardboard box Mae had sent with her, standing up at the sink. The frosting was too sweet. She ate the whole piece. Then she sent Sam a message of her own: I want to talk, but I don’t want Lucy to have to host it. Can you meet me outside the greenhouse at two? There was a public greenhouse near the park with benches beyond its rear wall. It was where Nora had once gone after a school meeting to calm down before driving home. Sam agreed. She picked up Lucy at one thirty, brought her back to the house, and said she was going out for an hour. Lucy asked if it was Sam. Nora said yes.
“Okay,” Lucy said. She settled at the table with her laptop. She did not ask Nora to stop seeing him, and Nora refused to pretend that was the same as being pleased.
Sam was waiting outside the greenhouse with a paper cup in each hand. He had bought tea from the kiosk. Nora accepted hers; he had remembered she took it without sugar. The door behind him stood open, showing rows of seedlings under mesh. For a few minutes they went in and looked at plants too small to identify. Nora liked the sharp smell of damp soil and the hot glass air. Sam read one label aloud and got the Latin name wrong. She corrected him. Neither laughed much.
Outside, they sat on the low stone border around a bed of herbs. “Ben said I did right to come for June,” Sam told her. “Then he asked why I hadn’t called you. I told him I couldn’t face it. He said he’d spent years wondering whether I would show up or send an arrangement, and now a child who wasn’t mine had spent the afternoon wondering a different version of the same thing.”
Nora sipped the tea. She did not want Ben made into a spokesman for her child, but she was glad he had said something to his father. “How is the apartment?”
“The kitchen ceiling has to be opened. Ben and June are at a friend’s place for the weekend. I went this morning to help move the dry things, then stayed for the lunch Ben asked me to bring.”
“He wanted you there.”
“He did. June insisted on carrying her rain boots. She wouldn’t let me carry them even when she needed both hands for the stairs.”
Nora could picture the boots swinging from one small fist. She felt tenderness for a child she’d never met, and the tenderness made her own anger harder to arrange. “Lucy is glad June is safe,” she said. “She knows why you went. She doesn’t want you at practice next week.”
“I won’t ask to go.” He set down his tea. “I wrote this. You can give it to her if she wants.” He held out a folded sheet, no envelope, no gift attached.
Nora looked at him. “Did you put me in it?”
“No.”
“Ben?”
“Only to say June needed me and I went to her. It’s two sentences, Nora.”
She took the paper but did not open it. Lucy could decide whether to read it, and Nora did not need to edit its tone for him. “I want to tell you one thing about yesterday,” she said. “When Lucy was answering the other team’s question, she looked at your seat. She kept going. Later she won. I was proud enough to shout, but every time she looked over I felt as if I had made her keep one part of her attention for you.”
“You didn’t make her do that.”
“I let us get close without talking to her much about what you might mean in the house. Then you promised something in front of her. I was pleased enough that I let the promise stand like she’d known you longer than she had.”
“I offered to come. That’s on me.”
“It is. I’m telling you my part, not splitting the bill.” Nora watched a child in a red jacket carry a flat of seedlings past them. “I wanted you at the final. I wanted you in that seat partly because I wanted to look over and find you there. Lucy wanted it for her own reasons. I don’t get to collapse those into one wish.”
Sam studied her face. “Are you asking me to stay away from you too?”
“No.” The answer was quicker than she had expected. “I am asking you to leave Lucy alone while she asks you to. And I am still deciding what to do with how much I want you.”
He reached for her hand, then waited. Nora moved hers into his. She was angry enough that the warmth of his palm almost offended her. She wanted to put her head on his shoulder. She did neither thing for a while, holding his hand without smoothing her expression.
“You don’t have to decide this afternoon,” he said.
“I know. I came because I didn’t want the next week to become a contest to see who could be quietest.” She felt him press his thumb once against her knuckle. “I have work tomorrow night. I want to see you alone next Friday. Dinner at your place, if that’s possible. No rescuing the evening with a gift.”
“Dinner is possible. I can cook something that won’t make a claim for me.”
“You can cook something good. I’m not punishing my mouth.”
The small laugh he made was helpless and familiar. Nora let herself look at him: the full fair hair the wind had flattened on one side, the broad face she liked more when he had nothing clever to say, the mouth she still wanted. She leaned forward and kissed him. It was brief and not an acquittal. He did not try to make it longer.
On the drive home, she stopped at the grocer for eggs and a newspaper Lucy liked to cut into source examples. She did not buy a plant from the greenhouse. She had liked looking at the seedlings without making a project of one.
Lucy was at the table when Nora returned. She had the debate recording open, this time paused on Darnell’s father’s head. Nora set the folded note near her, not under her hand. “From Sam. He said it’s short. You can leave it there.”
Lucy took it upstairs after supper. She did not mention it that evening. At bedtime she brought it back and left it on the kitchen counter beside the medal. The paper was unfolded. Nora did not read it until Lucy said, “You can see.”
Sam had written: I promised to come and did not. June needed me, but I had time to tell you I wasn’t coming, and I chose not to. I am sorry I left you looking for me. There was no line asking for an answer.
Lucy folded it again. “It’s true,” she said. “I still don’t want him at practice.”
“He knows.”
“Then that’s all.” Lucy picked up the medal and carried it back upstairs. Nora left the note on the counter until morning, where it could remain a fact without becoming the center of the house.
On Sunday afternoon, Lucy called Paul when she had said she would. She took the phone to the living room, where the medal lay on the coffee table next to the attendance sheet from the final. Nora was at the other end of the room ironing the green blouse she would wear to work that night. Lucy had not asked her to leave, and Nora did not offer herself as a silent interpreter.
“Yes, we won,” Lucy said into the phone. “The other team had the actual program attendance sheet. The city summary made it look as if nobody used the old building after three, which was ridiculous.” She listened, then gave a quick laugh. “No, we didn’t find that out during the round. They did. I had to answer it.”
Paul said something Nora could not hear. Lucy picked up the sheet and read him the temporary-room figure she’d found. She spoke with the bright impatience she used when someone might be able to keep up if they tried. The call lasted ten minutes before her shoulders tightened.
“I don’t want all of us to go for pizza,” she said. “You and I could go sometime. Mom doesn’t have to sit there so it feels like before.”
Nora kept the iron moving. There was a small burn mark near the collar she had missed when she bought the blouse. She turned the fabric and pressed the seam from the inside. Lucy listened longer than she had spoken.
“I miss the game,” she said. “I wrote that in my message. I’m not saying I want you to come over and play it in the same place.” She looked toward Nora, then looked away. “We could meet at the game shop next Saturday and pick a different one. If you’re free.”
When the call ended, Lucy set the phone facedown. “He was going to ask you if we could all have dinner,” she said.
“I heard you answer.”
“He said it would be less awkward for me. It wouldn’t.” She tapped the medal against the table once. “But he did ask how the attendance sheet worked. I had to explain what a temporary lease was. He listened after that.”
“Would you like me to take you to the game shop?”
“He can pick me up. If we actually set it. He said he needs to check his shift.” Lucy raised her eyebrows. “If he forgets, I’m not going to wait outside with a medal.”
Nora put the iron upright. “That’s a useful condition.”
“It’s not a condition. It’s a plan.” Lucy carried the sheet back to her desk. “I’m going to put this in my evidence folder for next year. The city might try the same thing with something else.”
Before her night shift, Nora made scrambled eggs with scallions and the last of the sharp cheese. Lucy tried them, declared that the pan had browned the bottom too much, and served herself more. Nora packed a portion for work. She took a bite from the pan before washing it. Lucy had been right about the edges, though not about the second serving.