Mick invited twelve and cooked for a firehouse.
He had done this before. He said it was impossible to buy a small enough piece of meat. Rae pointed out that shops sold individual portions to the elderly and unpopular every day. He pretended not to hear, which was one of the privileges he'd acquired by turning sixty.
The gym closed early on Wednesday. By six the bags had been hooked back, the folding tables were out, and Tony had washed the floor so thoroughly that somebody had to stand by the door and tell people not to walk in yet. Flo did this with a pleasure that worried Rae. She might have been born for a job involving a clipboard and limited mercy.
"Shoes," she told a man Rae had trained for fifteen years.
"They're clean."
"Then the towel won't mind meeting them."
Rae carried chairs from the storeroom and discovered Mick had invited people who didn't belong to the gym. A woman from the café with her husband. The mechanic who fixed his car. A quiet man called Ellis who had started beginner's boxing two weeks earlier and still apologized before hitting a pad. There were old fighters Rae knew and one whose name she could never retain because he introduced himself each time using a different account of his greatest night.
The last woman through the door carried a bag of ice against her hip and wore white sneakers already losing an argument with the weather. Mick called her Tess and told Rae she handled event accounts.
"He said don't bring anything," Tess said. "Then he asked if I had a cooler."
"I said if you happened to."
"I happened to have to drive to my sister's."
She put the ice down, took one look at the folding table and moved a hot plate away from the drinks. When Tony plugged in the second speaker the lights blinked. Tess reached behind the cooler and unplugged an extension cord.
"We can’t run both," she said. "Let the food finish first."
Tony tested the lights, then grinned at her. "You want a job?"
"Absolutely not. I saw the boss on the floor last week."
"Research," Rae said.
Tess held out her hand. Her grip was dry and brief. She was about Mick's age, Rae guessed, until she mentioned turning fifty-two and Mick made a noise about children getting everywhere. She asked Rae where she wanted the cooler. Rae said anywhere that wasn't in her way. Tess looked around the room.
"Where, Rae? I’m putting ice on your floor."
No event banner, no tickets. Mick had called it supper. Rae had been so busy imagining her own comeback that she hadn't asked what everyone else had been doing with the place.
He stood over two large pans on borrowed hot plates, wearing an apron printed with lobsters. A smear of sauce crossed the front of his shirt below it.
"What's the apron protecting?" Rae asked.
"My reputation."
"That ship—"
"Sailed. Yes. Lousy service on it. Get me the other spoon."
She found three spoons on the table. He looked over and indicated the smaller one with his chin.
"You said other, not miniature."
"People need to get it into their mouths, sweetheart, not build with it."
She handed it to him. He tasted the sauce, considered it, and added something from a cup he refused to identify. Rae dipped a finger. He slapped her wrist without looking.
"Wash."
"These hands have made us famous."
"They've touched the chairs."
She went to the sink.
When she returned, Ellis was standing near the ring, looking at the photographs. He wore a blue short-sleeved shirt buttoned all the way to his throat. The woman from the café asked him how the lessons were going. He laughed as if she'd made a joke at his expense.
"Slowly."
"Everybody starts slowly," Rae said.
"Not her," said the old fighter with the changing introduction. He pointed at Rae. "I saw her first month in. Terrible temper. Hands like stones."
"Still got them," Rae said. "Watch yourself."
People laughed. Ellis smiled politely and moved his glass from one hand to the other.
Mick came over carrying a stack of plates.
"Ellis rebuilt my alternator," he said.
The quiet man looked surprised. "We replaced—"
"He says replaced to keep me humble. Whole thing was making a sound like a nun sitting on a trumpet. I said, is it meant to do that? He said, not unless you ordered the extra."
"That wasn't me."
"One of you funny bastards. Eat something."
The café husband asked Ellis about a sound his van had been making. Ellis began cautiously, then put his glass on the ring apron and used both hands to show what he meant. Rae saw his shoulders come down. Mick had already left with the plates.
They ate off mismatched crockery because Mick disliked paper plates with a seriousness he never brought to his own parking. People sat wherever a chair fitted. Rae ended up between Tony and the mechanic's wife, who wanted to know if her son could do boxing without anyone hitting him.
"Most people prefer that version," Rae said. "How old?"
"Twenty-four."
"Send him. I'll let him make the decision."
"He's very sensitive."
"So am I. It's why I insist on hitting back."
Across the table Flo was telling Mick he had used enough salt to preserve an animal. He made her taste again. She did, frowned, and stole a second mouthful.
Tess asked Flo about school. When Flo said she was leaving for a program, Tess asked how she was paying for the first week before her paycheck arrived. Flo began to answer with the defensive speed Rae knew too well.
"Not asking to adopt you," Tess said. "My son lived on pretzels for four days because the apartment deposit ate his checking account. Wouldn't tell me. Told his barber."
"Did the barber give him money?" Flo asked.
"No. Called him an idiot. That's what twenty-eight dollars gets you."
Flo laughed and told her the actual plan. Rae heard her niece say the amount she had saved. It was more than Rae had thought.
The room became pleasantly disorderly. A person going to get water brought five glasses back. Someone dropped a fork and four people looked under the same table. Tony turned the music up, then down, then discovered the problem was the speaker nearest him had been disconnected all evening. Rae watched people settle into the building without needing her to tell them how.
Mick sat down last. By then his food had cooled, and he'd lost his place to a woman who'd only come to collect her husband. He pulled a stool up to the end of the table and ate with the pan on his knee until Flo made room.
"That's humiliating," Rae told him.
"At least I know where it's been."
The old fighter wanted the story about Cincinnati. Rae groaned before Mick could begin. This delighted everyone who hadn't heard it, and several who had.
"Don't let him tell you he fought a dog," she said.
"I never said I fought the dog. I said I had to come to an understanding."
They had been traveling for one of Rae's early fights, before the regional belt, before anybody paid enough to justify two hotel rooms. Mick had found a cheap place whose owner ran a bar next door and owned a dog large enough to be a household decision. The man promised two beds. What he provided was a bed and a reclining chair with somebody else's coins in it.
"He said the chair was good for the back," Mick told them. "Which I thought was a medical opinion outside his competence."
"You slept in the bed," Rae said.
"Eventually."
The dog had taken the bed first. Mick had tried speaking to it, then offering it a biscuit, then gently pulling the blanket. The dog had opened one eye and taken the biscuit without reconsidering the bed. Rae, exhausted and hungry, had begun to cry.
She didn't expect him to tell that part. He didn't.
"She says to me, move over," he told the table. "Not the dog. Me. Gets into bed with it. Big brute puts his head on her feet like she's booked the service. I had the chair."
"You had the other side by three," Rae said.
"Three of us. Very respectable. Nothing improper."
The table laughed. Rae laughed too. She remembered the weight of the animal on her shins, Mick's loud embarrassed snore, the coins falling out of the chair at midnight when he finally gave up. She'd won the fight the next day. He had bought her pancakes with the money he'd found.
"Fortune favors the bold," he said.
"It favors whoever stole the parking meter," Flo said.
Mick wagged his fork at her. "Education's ruining you."
After supper they moved the tables nearer the wall. Someone put a compilation of old fights on the gym screen. Rae usually left it running for the adults who came in early and wanted permission to stand around. Tonight the sound was low under the music. A much younger Mick appeared at ringside, hair dark, jacket enormous.
"Look at that," Flo said. "You were a door-to-door sofa salesman."
"Fashion," Mick said.
"An accusation, surely."
Rae recognized the tape a second before the title on the bottom of the screen. The regional championship in 2014. Alicia Torres in red, Rae in black. At twenty-six Rae had possessed an extraordinary faith in the value of being miserable for longer than other people. You could see it in the way she went back to her corner, sitting before Mick had the stool fully in place. Young, impatient, already certain the evening would belong to her if she refused to share it.
"There's Senn," Tess said.
At the edge of the picture a younger Dorian held a roll of tape and a clipboard. Rae had forgotten the heavy glasses. He had worked in the old promoter's office then, one of several men who could get you a chair but not tell you where your check was.
"He carried everything," Mick said. "Thought they'd give him the building if he never put anything down."
"Maybe that's how you get one," Tess said.
She picked up Flo's empty glass and asked who else wanted water.
On the screen Alicia sat across the ring. The camera went close enough to see her speaking to her trainer. She didn't look destroyed. That had always been the point when Rae showed it.
"This is the one?" asked the changing-story fighter.
"That's the one."
Rae leaned against the desk. The shoulders on the screen were thin compared with hers now. She remembered how sharp everything had felt that night: the dressing-room air, the cloth at her neck, the touch of Mick's hands. When Alicia didn't come out for the next round, the first thing Rae had thought was that something had been taken away. A chance to finish. Then the belt came, and the people came, and she learned how to enjoy a different ending.
"She wouldn't come out?" Ellis asked.
"Nope," Rae said. "Decided the stool was her best weight."
People laughed. She'd said it a hundred times. It always worked.
"What was wrong with her?" he asked.
"Nothing I could see. That's the lesson. You keep making someone do the thing they don't want to do. Eventually they find a reason to stop."
Mick stood beside her holding two plates. "You were too much for her that night."
Rae watched herself realize she had won. Her whole face opened in a way she would now find embarrassing to do in public. She turned toward Mick before the referee, before the camera. Even with the sound off she could remember shouting his name.
Flo sat on the edge of a table, watching the screen with her arms folded.
"You look like a different person," she said.
"I had better knees."
"Your face."
"That too."
Tony asked if Rae could send him the clip. He wanted to put it on the gym's page with the new fight details. Dorian's people had asked for old footage, and Tony had promised to find something useful.
"Flo's got it," Rae said. "Use the short version. Nobody wants the whole night."
Mick went to the sink with the plates.
Later, when most people had left, Rae helped him put the chairs away. He refused to let Tony clean a floor he'd already cleaned once, which Tony accepted with suspicious speed. Flo left with two containers of food and the promise that she would return them. Rae told her to bring an umbrella, then looked out at a clear sky and realized she'd sounded like her sister.
"She'll be fine," Mick said.
"Who's worried?"
He handed her another chair.
The gym grew larger as the tables disappeared. Somebody had brought flowers in a washed-out pickle jar. They stood on the front desk beside a pair of damp wraps. Rae took the wraps away and moved the flowers into the middle. The gesture left her unexpectedly pleased.
Mick checked the stove twice and the back gate once. Rae watched him turn off the lights in the upstairs room. He knew the bad switch, the one that needed a little pressure to the left. He had never lived here. He knew more of the building's habits than she did.
"Good night," she said when he came down.
"It was, wasn't it?"
"You could do less food."
"Then who'd come?"
"Nobody likes you that much."
He smiled, tired now. She saw the age in his face when he wasn't directing it toward anyone. The lower lids, the deep line beside his mouth. He'd been older than she was now when they first met. She had thought him ancient.
"You need a ride?" he asked.
"I'm going to walk."
"It's late."
"I know some boxing."
"That's what worries me."
At the door he stopped and reached into his jacket. He took out a little tube of the hand cream she'd used for years and put it on the desk.
"Saw it cheap," he said.
"You have to buy six to get that price."
"Then I've got five Christmases done."
After he left, Rae stayed long enough for the building to lose the noise of people. The rice cooker was unplugged. The flowers leaned toward the last strip of daylight. On the screen her younger self still wore the regional belt, caught in a paused frame with Mick's arm around her neck.
She turned the screen off. In the dark glass she could see the room behind her and, between the ropes, the patch of canvas where she'd learned how to make people come to her.