I picked Mason up from his after-school program at four-thirty.
He’d made a poster in art class. GO KAYLEE, with a picture of a volleyball. It looked a lot like a pumpkin.
“It’s a volleyball,” he told me, before I could say anything. “I ran out of white.”
We got to the gym at five-fifteen. I was wearing my maroon booster club sweatshirt, the one with the volleyball on the sleeve.
Travis came straight from the shed in his fleece vest with the seed company logo on the chest. He sat down next to me in the front row of the bleachers without saying much.
The gym smelled like popcorn and floor wax. And that hot electrical smell the old scoreboard makes when it’s been on for an hour.
The booster club had hung maroon and gold streamers along every railing.
Each of the six seniors had a big poster on an easel by the scorer’s table. Her number. Her picture.
Kaylee’s showed her in midair at a home game last fall. Her braid flying out behind her like a rope.
On the scorer’s table was a bucket of red roses from the flower shop on Main Street.
Each senior carries one out and hands it to whoever walks her. That’s how it’s been done here as long as anybody can remember.
Travis looked at those roses. Then he looked away.
I saw him do it.
He had his hands clasped between his knees. He kept rubbing his thumb over the side of his first finger. A thing he does when he’s nervous.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“Fine,” he said.
The exact same flat voice Kaylee had used on Tuesday.
For one second, they sounded so much alike I almost laughed. Except nothing about it was funny.
The JV girls played the visitors from two towns over. They lost the first set. Then won the next two.
Mason cheered for both teams. He didn’t entirely understand which side was ours.
At six o’clock, I watched the side door.
At six-oh-five, I watched it harder.
Dad has never been late. But he’s also never been seventy-nine with a new hip on a cold October night before.
Travis noticed me watching.
“Who are you looking for?”
“Nobody,” I said.
That was a lie. It sat in my mouth like a sour mint.
At twelve minutes after six, the side door swung open.
And my father walked through it.
My whole chest let go of something I’d been holding since Tuesday supper.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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