John Hardesty was middling height and weight with sandy-brown hair. His wife, Sarah, helped out a couple of evenings a week and between them they had five children, one from his previous marriage, two from Sarah’s and two together. If he was gay, it was a very closet condition.

“Why do you do this to me?” John said, going over to the lockers and pulling out pads.

“It builds character,” Barb replied, flipping to her feet. She fielded the tossed pads and started getting them on.

Once they were both in pads, with helmets and mouthpieces in, they touched hands and closed.

John started the attack with a hammer strike and then bounced away lightly, staying out of reach of her grappling attack. He’d learned, through painful experience, not to even think of grappling with her.

In honesty, the reason that Brandon and Brook, and up until recently Allison, studied with Master Yi, was that Master Yi was simply better than John. John had Barbara, a touch, on speed. And he was definitely stronger; any reasonably in-shape male would be. But Barb had started training when she was five, when her father had been a foreign area officer assigned in Hong Kong. Over the succeeding twenty-eight years she had never once been out of training. The quality varied and the forms definitely varied; over the years she’d studied wah lum and dragon kung fu, karate in the U.S. and Japan, hop-ki do in Korea and the U.S. and aikido. But by the time she was Allison’s age, she could have won most open tournaments if they were “all forms.” And if all attacks were allowed.

John Hardesty, on the other hand, was straight out of the “tournament” school of karate. He’d won southeast regional a time or two, come in second nationally, and now owned the de rigueur local martial arts school. He was good, but he was by no means a superior fighter. And he’d come to that conclusion after sparring with Barbara only once.