Chapter Six

The village threw the party the way the village threw everything, with drums and frying oil and somebody’s generator running lights out to the road. It was for her. People kept saying her name into her face. Mama Osaro told the story of the letter four times that Dara heard, and the boy who had carried it stood near the food all night, getting fed for it.

Her father wasn’t there.

She looked twice, three times, working the edges of the crowd. He hadn’t come down. After a while she took the letter and went up the hill to the house, the music falling away behind her a little with every step.

The kitchen had one lamp on. The little television was going with the sound off, and on it, frozen, was her — her own race from the regional, stopped mid-stride in lane three. Her father sat at the table with the notebook and the pencil and the stopwatch lying on the wood by his hand. He was running the tape back and forth over the same stretch of race.

“They posted the heats,” she said. “Lane four. Coach Emeka says nobody from the Highlands has ever—”

“Your last two hundred.”

She stopped.

“You fade.” He touched the screen where she was frozen. “Here. Forty meters where your knees stop lifting. At the Continental, that fade is the whole race.”

She came to the table. She put the letter down on the wood and pushed it across, next to the stopwatch.

“Pick it up.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“You haven’t held it.”

“Holding it doesn’t fix your knees.”

She laughed. It came out wrong, even to her.

“One night,” she said. “I’m not asking for the medal. I’m asking for one night where the man at this table is my father and not my coach.”

“They’re the same man.”

“No.” She heard her own voice drop. “The coach showed up. I’ve been waiting seventeen years for the other one.”

He didn’t raise his voice. She had never once heard him raise it.

“When you stand on that line, none of those people will love you. The clock does not love you. I am the only one who tells you the truth — and you call it—”

“Nothing I do will ever be enough for you.”

The lamp hummed. Down the hill the music was still going, very small from here.

She gave him time. She stood there and gave him all the time in the world.

For a second he looked like he was going to say something else.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Hills. Before light.”

She left the letter where it was and walked out.

In the yard she looked back once. Through the window he was bent over the notebook, writing. Tomorrow’s session, she supposed. She watched him write it, the lamp on his hands, the letter at the edge of the light where she’d left it.

She walked down the hill. The music got bigger the closer she came, and at the bottom everyone wanted to dance with her, and the night was warm.

She danced.