**Part 2**
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.
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.
He was wearing his tan Sunday sport coat. The one he wore to my mother’s funeral. And to Mason’s baptism. And to nothing in between.
Under it, a white shirt buttoned all the way to the top.
And on his head, his seed corn cap. The good one. The green one he keeps on the hook by the back door and only wears to town.
His cane was in his right hand. His shoes were shined.
He didn’t climb up into the bleachers.
He went straight down to the end of the gym where the seniors were lining up. And he stood right next to Kaylee. Like he’d been assigned there by the governor.
Travis saw him.
I watched it land on his face.
First confusion. The plain kind. Like a man who sees his own truck parked somewhere he didn’t leave it.
Then understanding.
Then something else. Something I didn’t have a word for.
He turned and looked at me.
I looked back at him.
I didn’t explain. He didn’t ask.
“Jodi,” he said quietly.
“She asked for him,” I said. “Tuesday night. After you went out to the shed.”
He nodded. Slowly.
He looked back down at the floor. Kaylee had taken her grandfather’s free arm, and she was laughing at something he’d said. Her laugh carried all the way across the gym.
Travis didn’t say anything else.
He put his hands back between his knees.
But he stopped rubbing his thumb.
He went very still. The way a man goes still up in a deer stand.
The JV girls cleared the floor. The varsity girls from both teams lined up along the far sideline for the ceremony. Our girls in maroon. The visitors in white. Everybody with their hands clasped behind their backs.
Mr. Halvorson does the announcing at every home game.
He taught shop at our school for thirty years. He has a voice like a man calling hogs who’s been to a little bit of college.
He tapped the microphone twice.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Please welcome our senior volleyball players and their families, as we honor them on their final regular-season home game.”
The first girl was announced with her mother and father. They walked out to center court together. She handed her mother the rose. They turned for a picture. Everybody clapped.
The second girl walked out with her mother and her stepfather.
I noticed that. Of course I noticed that.
I didn’t look at Travis. But I felt him notice it too.
The rose went to the mother. The stepfather put his arm around both of them.
The third girl had both parents and a grandmother in a wheelchair, pushed out by an uncle. The grandmother got the loudest cheer so far.
Then Mr. Halvorson looked down at his index card.
And I saw him pause. Just slightly. The same way Mrs. Larson had paused on the phone.
Then he read it.
“Number seventeen. A middle hitter and four-year letter winner. Kaylee Brandt. Escorted tonight by her grandfather, Mr. Duane Ostrem.”
A murmur went through the bleachers.
Half the people in that gym had bought milk off my father at one time or another. Or ridden the school bus with him in the seventies. Or sat on a church council with him.
Kaylee moved the rose to her left hand. She slid her right arm through his left.
He planted the cane.
And they started across the floor.
They walked slow. Because he walks slow now.
Cane, step, step.
Cane, step, step.
That rubber tip squeaked on the varnished floor every single time it came down. You could hear it all the way up in the top row.
Mr. Halvorson kept reading. There’s a list for every senior, and he reads all of it.
“Kaylee has been on the honor roll all four years. She is a member of the National Honor Society, and has shown dairy heifers in 4-H for eight years…”
Then somebody in the top row stood up.
I don’t know who. I’ve asked around since. Nobody will claim it.
It might have been Mrs. Bauer. But I doubt she can stand up that fast.
Then the row under that one stood up.
Then the whole top section.
It went down the bleachers like water running down a hill. Row after row after row. Until the entire home side of that gym was on its feet.
Old men who’d hauled milk with my father stood up. Women from his church circle stood up. Little kids who had no idea who he was stood up because everybody else was standing.
And then the girls on the visiting team, in their white jerseys over on the far sideline, started clapping.
And then their parents, on the other side of the gym, stood up too.
I had both hands over my mouth.
I didn’t decide to put them there. They just went there. And stayed. And I could feel my face getting wet against my palms.
My father didn’t look up at any of it.
He kept his eyes on the floor in front of his cane. The same way he always watched his footing in the barn.
Kaylee had her head turned toward him. Saying something low.
And next to me, Travis stood up.
At first I thought he was just standing because everybody else was standing.
But he wasn’t clapping.
His hands were down at his sides. He was looking at the bleacher steps at the end of our row.
His jaw was working. Side to side.
I’ve seen him do that exactly twice in nine years. Once when he asked me to marry him. Once at his mother’s funeral.
He put his hand on the metal rail.
And he took the first step down.
Mr. Halvorson was still reading.
“After graduation, Kaylee plans to attend Minnesota State University in Mankato, to study nursing…”
Travis took the next step. And the next.
There are four steps from the front row of our bleachers down to the gym floor.
I counted every one of them. Because I couldn’t breathe.
He walked out onto that varnished floor in his work boots and his fleece vest.
Kaylee and Dad were maybe ten feet from center court.
Travis lengthened his stride. And he caught up to them.
He didn’t say anything to them.
He didn’t ask.
He just came up on Kaylee’s other side. Her left. The side away from the cane.
And he offered her his arm. The way you would at a wedding.
Kaylee stopped walking.
She looked at his arm.
She looked up at his face.
I couldn’t see her expression from where I was. But I could see her shoulders.
They went up.
And then they came down.
And she put her hand through his arm.
And the three of them walked the last ten feet together.
Cane, step, step.
Cane, step, step.
Travis matched my father’s pace exactly.
The noise in that gym. I can’t describe it.
It had been loud before. Now it was something else entirely.
Mason was jumping up and down on the bleacher seat next to me, yelling at the top of his lungs.
“That’s my dad! That’s my dad!”
Mr. Halvorson had run out of things on his index card.
He stood there at the scorer’s table with the microphone in his hand, looking at the three of them standing at center court.
And I watched him make a decision.
He walked the microphone out onto the floor.
And he handed it to Travis.
Because it’s a small town, and everybody in that gym knew him, nobody thought it was strange.
And nobody sat down.
Travis looked at that microphone like it was a live wire.
He’s not a talker. He sells seed to farmers who don’t like salesmen. And he does it by saying as little as possible and always showing up.
The gym got quiet.
Not all at once. In waves. From the floor up. Until the only sound left was the hum of the old scoreboard and somebody’s baby fussing up in the corner.
Travis lifted the microphone to his mouth.
His hand was shaking. I could see it from the front row.
“I’m Travis,” he said. “I’m Kaylee’s stepdad. I’ve been her stepdad for nine years.”
He stopped.
He looked down at the floor.
My father didn’t move. Kaylee didn’t move.
“Tuesday night at supper,” Travis said, “she asked me to walk her out tonight. And I told her no. I told her this walk was for real dads.”
There was a sound from the bleachers. Not quite a gasp. More like four hundred people letting out their breath at the same time.
“I said it because I thought I didn’t have the right,” Travis said. “I thought I’d be taking something that belonged to somebody else. I’ve thought that for nine years.”
Then he turned and looked at Kaylee.
Right at her. In front of four hundred people, my husband looked at my daughter.
“I was wrong,” he said. “I’ve been your dad for nine years, Kay. I just never had the guts to say it out loud.”
His voice cracked.
“I’m saying it now. And I’m sorry.”
He handed the microphone back to Mr. Halvorson, who took it like it was made of glass.
Travis looked like he wanted to sink straight down through that varnish into the crawl space.
Kaylee didn’t say anything.
She just turned and pressed her face into the front of his fleece vest.
And he put both his arms around her.
And her long blond braid hung down his back.
And that’s when my father did the thing I’ll think about for the rest of my life.
Kaylee had given him the rose. She’d put it in his hand the second they stopped at center court. The same way the other girls had given theirs to their parents.
He’d been holding it against his cane.
He waited until Kaylee stepped back from Travis.
Then he held the rose out. Stem first. To my husband.
Travis looked at it.
He didn’t take it.
He shook his head a little. Like he was telling Dad no. That’s yours. You earned it. You walked the whole way.
My father didn’t lower his arm.
He just kept holding it out. Patient. The same way he used to hold out a bottle to a stubborn calf until it decided on its own.
The gym had gone so quiet, I was close enough to hear what he said.
“I already raised mine, son,” my father said. “This one’s yours.”
Travis took the rose.
My father touched the brim of his seed corn cap to Kaylee. Like a man saying good morning at the co-op.
Then he turned around. He planted the cane. And he started back across that floor by himself.
Somebody went out to help him. One of the JV girls. A sophomore I didn’t know.
He let her walk beside him. But he didn’t take her arm.
He made it all the way to the end of the bleachers on his own.
Then he climbed the four steps. One at a time. Hand on the rail.
And he sat down in the front row right next to me.
He was breathing hard.
He reached over and patted my knee. Twice.
“Well,” he said. “That went all right.”
I couldn’t answer him.
I just put my head down on his shoulder, on that tan Sunday sport coat that still smelled a little like cedar from his closet.
And I cried like I hadn’t cried since my mother died.
Down on the floor, the coach had come out with her phone to take the picture.
Travis and Kaylee stood in front of her poster. Him holding the rose. Her holding his arm. Both of them red in the face.
Then Kaylee looked up at the bleachers.
She waved at Mason and me and her grandpa to come down.
Mr. Halvorson leaned into the microphone.
“Come on, Jodi. Bring ’em down here.”
And everybody laughed.
So we went down. Dad, Mason, and me.
Dad took those stairs a second time without one word of complaint.
That picture, the five of us at center court under the maroon and gold streamers, is the one on our refrigerator now.
Mason’s holding his pumpkin volleyball poster upside down in it.
Nobody noticed until we got it printed.
We left it.
