Wednesday night after supper, I called Dad.
He picks up on the fourth ring. Every single time. The phone hangs on the wall in the kitchen, and his recliner is in the front room.
I told him all of it. Travis. Tuesday’s supper. Those words. Real dads.
He didn’t interrupt once.
He listened the way he used to listen to a cow that was off her feed. Quiet. Patient.
When I was done, he didn’t say a word about Travis.
He didn’t ask what was wrong with that man, the way some fathers would’ve.
He just asked one question.
“Does Travis know you’re asking me?”
“No,” I said.
He was quiet for a long time. I could hear the clock over his stove ticking. That clock’s been ticking in that kitchen since before I was born.
“Well,” he finally said. “What time do I need to be there?”
I told him JV played at five-thirty. Senior night would be right after. Around a quarter to seven.
He said he’d be there by six.
My father has never been late to anything in his life.
“Dad,” I said. “You’d have to walk all the way across the gym floor. It’s a long way. With the cane.”
“I walked a lot farther than that in a snowstorm to get to the barn,” he said. “I suppose I can make it across a gymnasium for my granddaughter.”
I didn’t tell Travis that night.
I want to be honest about that too.
I could have told him.
He’d have known what it meant. Maybe he’d have changed his mind before the game.
But then it would’ve been the same thing as making him. A man changing his mind because his father-in-law was about to show him up.
I didn’t want that either.
So I let him go to bed not knowing.
He kissed me goodnight, like always. He set his alarm for 5:15, like always. He didn’t say anything about Kaylee. And neither did I.
I lay awake in the dark listening to him breathe. And I wondered what kind of woman sets up her own husband to be embarrassed in front of the whole school.
I didn’t have a good answer.
I still don’t. Not entirely.
On Thursday, I cleaned teeth from eight to four.
Mrs. Bauer, who’s eighty-four and has had the same partial plate since the Carter administration, told me she’d be at the game.
“I wouldn’t miss senior night,” she said, around my mirror and my scaler. “I haven’t missed one since my Jim’s sister played. That was 1974. They played in bloomers back then. Or near enough.”
Everybody goes to senior night in our town.
Our school’s a consolidated district. Three little towns that merged back in the nineties when none of them could field a football team alone anymore.
About four hundred kids in the whole building. Kindergarten through twelfth grade.
There were six seniors on the volleyball team that year. When you’ve only got six, everybody in town knows every one of them by name.
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