The Chair at Signing Day

The year in between

The checks came.

The first one came out of his paycheck on the fifteenth of March, through the state, the way they are supposed to. It was not the full $410 that first month because the withholding takes a while to start, and the next week a money order came in the mail for the difference, with nothing written on it but the amount.

April came on time. May came on time.

In June, Daddy told me Rick had come by his place.

“Out at the house?” I said.

“Sat on the porch an hour,” Daddy said. He was cleaning his reading glasses on his shirttail. “Didn’t come in. Didn’t ask to. Thanked me.”

“What did you say?”

“Told him he was welcome.” He held the glasses up to the light. “Told him the boy was worth every mile, and he ought to know that, because he’s the one that missed them.”

“Was that all?”

“Told him to get his oil changed,” Daddy said. “That Ford’s burning it. You can smell it from the road.”

The checks kept coming. July, August. Caleb left for Kansas in the middle of August with a duffel bag and a mini-fridge and a new pair of wrestling shoes Daddy bought him and would not tell me the price of.

Daddy and I drove him up. Six hours. Daddy drove the whole way and would not let me spell him.

When we pulled out of the dorm parking lot, Daddy did not say anything for the first ninety miles. Then, somewhere south of Dodge City, he said, “Quiet in here.”

“It is,” I said.

He reached over and opened the glove box and took out a sack of sunflower seeds and handed it to me without looking. I laughed, and then I didn’t, and we drove the rest of the way home like that.

The first meet

In September, Caleb called and asked if it would be all right with me if he called his father.

He did not need my permission. He was a grown man in college. But he asked anyway, and I loved him for it.

“It’s been seven months,” I said. “Has the money been on time?”

“You tell me,” he said.

“Every month,” I said. “Every single month.”

“Then I think I’m going to call him.”

He did. I don’t know what they talked about. I didn’t ask. Caleb told me afterward that it went all right, and that his father was quieter than he remembered, and that he asked a lot of questions about wrestling he didn’t know the answers to.

“He’s going to learn,” Caleb said. “Grandpa can teach him.”

His first college meet was a dual in November, at home, in a gym about the size of our high school’s. Daddy and I drove up the night before and stayed at a motel off the highway that had a waffle iron in the lobby.

Daddy had his feed-store cap on. He’d put that clipping in a plastic sleeve so it would not wear out, and before we went in, I saw him take his wallet out in the parking lot and look at it one more time, and put it back.