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—I don’t want this, I say, trying to hand it back to him.

—Just hold on to it. And look, the other thing . . . He pushes the nose of one of his shoes into the wood chips packed around the bench. —Don’t feel like you have to come tomorrow.

—No, I want to be there, I say.

I don’t really, now that he’s got me so spooked. And I told Allison a couple of years ago that I wouldn’t be coming as much to the games. But it would be crazy not to go to his match. I know my mother needs me there.

I can tell he’s wrestling with things, and maybe my eyes are kind of filling up.

—So let’s hear it, he says, indicating my computer. I pull it from the backpack, open the lid, and bring up the file. I hold the screen out to him.

—No, read it aloud, he says.

Tommy stretches his arms along the back of the bench and closes his eyes to listen. He leans his head back. I see the stubble he missed on his neck. And though I don’t want to, I think about the fragility of a neck.

Nothing’s worse than a Glad going into a fight this way, with a clear lack of confidence. The whole thing scratches at my throat. I have an impulse to tell Tommy that he’s the only father I’ve ever loved, but I don’t want to make an idiot of myself. So I let it go.

—Are you awake? I ask.

Tommy cracks one eye open. —Would you start reading already?

—Okay. Okay.

I get to the last sentence.

—Eventually Glad sport, though not always a fight to the death, certainly offered this possibility.

Then I turn off my computer. Tommy nods.

—That’s as far as I’ve gotten, I say.

—You’ve nailed it, he says.

—You haven’t told Allison about it, right?

—You asked me not to.

—She’d just freak again about college and stuff.

—She does have that solid panic reflex, he says.

Then he makes this face, like it’s just something we have to go through with Allison, the way we have to put up with metal dust in our soup from his sword sharpening in the kitchen and the fact that I tend to leave the flat iron on in my bathroom and have almost burned the house down six times. But I know her fretfulness digs in, that his patience with her can get as thin as mine.

—Allison said something the other day . . . that you’re reading up on nonviolence? he says.

—Which she finds thoroughly humiliating.

—You might want to try Thomas Merton. He’s pretty good.

I always stop myself, at moments like this, from asking him how long he’ll hang in.

CHAPTER

3

Thad and I have this ritual. We like to go to the Museum of Science on the Friday evenings when I’m not working, after it turns dark. As soon as Tommy and I get back to the house, Allison makes a light dinner for Thad and then I help him find a clean T-shirt and comb his hair for him.

GSA women wear a certain kind of boot made from Italian leather, sometimes sandals with at least fifteen straps—not the pseudogladiator style you see everywhere now—and tunics on occasion. But I wear jeans and T-shirts mostly. Sam and Callie and I used to wear these cutoff stolas of our mothers’—the layer that goes over a toga—but that’s when you get really annoying comments so I stopped doing that. Of course Sam’s the kind of girl to wear barrettes dipped in the blood of gladiators, which she claims they did in Imperial Rome, and this, I think, kind of encapsulates her personality. The most I’ll do now is wear a few bloodless beads, a little gold—my beat-in leather jacket always. I really couldn’t care beyond that.

And sometimes it’s almost easier to be in uniform. At my fast-food nation job, it’s really hot and you have to lift heavy boxes of frozen food substance and you get spattered with sizzling grease. But you have this uniform and this cap and you’re just one of the underpaid and completely marginalized jerks like everyone else and no one asks if you come from seven types of men—you just fry and salt and squirt and slap and wrap and bag.

I get Thad settled in the backseat and we drive down Cambridge Street to avoid as much rush hour traffic as possible,