The ledgers were gone from her father's desk, and Jo had just lied to Rusk Mercantile to be here.
She had called in sick at seven. Six years without a sick day, and her supervisor said "Feel better" like a woman reading it off a card. Now Jo stood in the glass-walled office with the army cot at her back and a clean rectangle in the chalk dust on the blotter. Who takes the books off a dead man's desk?
"Morning, chief."
Frankie stood at the whiteboard outside the glass, marker in one hand, a green cloth ledger pinned under his elbow. The board was a grid of kids' class times and member birthdays and a doodle of a fish smoking a cigar. He did not look sorry.
"Those are mine to read," Jo said.
"They're mine to run. Who do you think pays the water bill? Pop had a system, Jo. If you move one page, the whole thing falls over."
"Then it's a weak system."
He laughed, which was how she knew he was angry. He held the ledger out at arm's length, like a waiter with a bad bottle. "Page forty. Try not to cry on the arithmetic."
She read it standing up. Thirty-eight members at $70 was $2,660 a month. The building cost $4,400. Short $1,740, every month, patched by her father with whatever he could scrape up, until March 2, when a line appeared that was not scraping. $150,000 in.
Then it went out. Training camp for Noor Haddad. The title sanction fee. A second camp deposit. Pop had not touched the roof, or the boiler, or one patched bag.
"You told me the loan was for the roof," Jo said.
"It was a roof situation. I got three quotes." Frankie got more specific the more he lied; she had known that since he was nine. "There's a guy in Halsey, he's very reasonable."
"He bet the building on her."
"He bet it on a sure thing." Frankie capped the marker. "Ask anyone. Ask her."
Noor was upstairs in the room over the office, eating cold noodles out of the pot with a pair of tongs. She listened to Jo's request. She went to a duffel, dug under a mouthguard and a roll of tape, and came back with a manila folder.
"Northline Sports," Noor said. "He told me to keep it on me."
Jo read the Northline deal the way she read everything, bottom first. If Noor won the title, a $600,000 bonus. The manager took twenty-five percent. That was $150,000, paid one business day after the fight, which was Monday, December 21. The same Monday the loan came due.
If Noor lost, nothing. And paragraph nine, the one Kell had quoted: if her management passed to a promoter, the whole deal was void.
"So he knew," Jo said. "Exactly what it paid and exactly when."
"He said it was the only way to save the building." Noor took the folder back and held it against her chest with the tongs. "He didn't say save it for who."
Jo went down the stairs with her jaw set and her ledger arithmetic running, and stopped inside the office door. Frankie was in there now, loading the blue zippered deposit bag for his Monday bank run. Behind him, on the wall, hung a framed fight poster she had avoided looking at for two days.
DANNY MARCHETTI. PORT ELGIN. MARCH 17, 2012.
Her father's name was not on it. His corner was not on it. Jo knew what was on it anyway, because that Saturday she had been seventeen in the Rockport Armory, in the national final, with a stool and a bucket and nobody to hold either one.
"The night he picked Mikey," Jo said.
Frankie's hand stopped on the zipper. She watched him decide to say something, a joke, an apology, a date. He zipped the bag shut and put it over his shoulder, and walked out past her without a word. Down on the floor, the front door bell jingled.
At noon Noor sparred.
The partner was a big welterweight named Cole, with a jab like a car door. Noor hummed before the bell, two flat notes over and over, then walked out and took the jab on her forearm.
Jo stood at the ropes with her arms crossed and told herself it was inventory. Southpaw, short reach, feet always under her. She took a right to the body and gave nothing back. She worked him to the corner. Her father's eye woke up in Jo's head, and she could not stop it: weight on the back foot, the lead shoulder dipping.
Cole threw the jab again. Noor slid right, planted, and stepped back off the line with her left hand already turning over. A hook, short and tight, that landed as she left. Cole's head snapped around and his knees went loose.
Jo knew it before the sound reached her. She had been fourteen, in this ring, a Saturday in winter with the heaters ticking, and her father had held her wrist and walked her through it forty times. Plant, step back, turn. *Nobody else gets this one, Jo. This one's only yours.*
Noor caught her looking. She stepped to the ropes with the mouthguard half out and her gloves hanging.
"He called it the Jojo," Noor said.
Jo uncrossed her arms. She said nothing. She walked past the heavy bags and into the office and shut the glass door, and sat on her father's cot with her hands flat on her knees until the phone in her jacket started to buzz.
"Jo. Wendell Ames." The broker's voice was dry and quick and bright with money. "Heard about your father. I'll skip the flowers. I have a cash buyer for Kowalczyk's Boxing Club LLC. The building and the management contract on the girl. A hundred and sixty-five thousand."
Pay off $140,000. Pocket $25,000. Never see this room again.
"He signs Wednesday at noon," Ames said. "After that, the offer's gone."
Jo looked at the poster, and the red gloves on the wall, and the stopwatch ticking on the ring post beyond the glass.
"Yes," she said. "Tell him yes."
She turned, and Noor was standing in the office doorway.