They laughed. I shook my head. Never mind the conversation; the girl facing me wore small triple-hoop earrings. The two outer hoops were gold; the inner was silver. My mother owned a similar pair, and I remembered them perfectly because I had bought them for her. It was the summer before high school. There was an open tournament in which I wanted to wrestle at a venue an hour away from home, but I knew she already had plans and I didn’t bother asking because it was on her birthday. I placed the flyer on my bedroom dresser and went out for a run. When I returned, my mother was on the couch with the flyer in her lap.

“You didn’t mention this,” she said.

I shrugged. It was mid-July and I had already wrestled in six tournaments that summer. I had won four of them, took second at one, took fourth at another. “It’s your birthday,” I said.

“So what?”

“You have plans.”

“So? I could cancel ’em. I’d rather watch you wrestle.”

“You’ve seen me wrestle like forty matches this year. Your birthday only comes once.”

“And every one of those matches was greater than all my birthdays combined.”

“You’re crazy, Mom.”

“Okay, how about this. You promise to win it for me, and we’ll go.”

“Puh-lease,” I said. “I’ll win that shit for you.”

She tossed her hands in the air. “Well, it looks like we’re going then.”

On the day of the tournament, we had to wake at seven to arrive in time for weigh-ins. It was just the two of us, which had never happened before. I was usually able to talk one of my friends into wrestling with me, or one of my mom’s friends would tag along for the ride, or on rare occasions, my father came. But it was never just us. She would be the only one in my corner for each match, which meant she’d have to coach me. Her coaching came in the form of yells of yes or no, or simply just shrieks of encouragement. Sometimes that was all I needed.

I won my first match by three points, my second by a score often to six, and my third went into overtime before I took the kid down with an ankle pick to win five to three. That put me in the finals against a kid who had won all his matches via pin.

“You’ll beat him,” she said. I appreciated her optimism, but I had my doubts.

“I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will, Bubby.”