Chapter Five

The letter came on a Tuesday, in the middle of a session, carried down the track road at a dead sprint by Ekhose’s boy, who was waving it over his head and shouting her name with no breath left to shout it with.

It had a crest on it. The paper was heavy. She read it twice and the words didn’t change.

The village arrived the way the village always arrived, all at once and from everywhere. The slope emptied. The stand emptied. There were drums from somewhere — there were always drums from somewhere. People she barely knew held her by the shoulders and looked into her face and laughed.

She looked for her father.

He was across the lanes at the rail, and for a moment, before anyone reached him, his face was doing something she didn’t have a name for. Then Mama Osaro got to him and pounded his shoulder, and by the time Dara could see him again through the crowd he looked the way he always looked.

Pride, she decided.

Later, when the track had mostly emptied and what was left of the food was being argued over, she saw her father and Cheta standing apart at the rail. Cheta said something. Her father said something short. Cheta looked away down the lanes and raked dirt that didn’t need raking.

She was too far to hear any of it, and too happy to wonder.

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He doubled the hill sessions that week.

On the third climb of the first morning he stopped halfway up, which he never did, and stood looking out at the valley while she finished the rep above him. When she came back down he said the view was the point of hills.

She had never heard him say anything was the point of anything except splits.

Good mood, she thought. The letter.

On Friday he came back from town with a paper bag that went into his coat pocket and stayed there. She was stretching in the yard and thinking about lane draws.

The Games were fourteen weeks away. He doubled the hills again.

She didn’t complain.