The Last Ten Feet on Senior Night

Ryan took a job in the North Dakota oil fields when Kaylee was four.

The money was good and the distance turned out to be better, for him. He came home less, then not at all.

For a while he called on her birthdays. Then he called on some of them.

The last call came when she turned eleven. He promised to drive down for her confirmation. He did not come.

That was six years ago. She has a phone number for him that she has not dialed since seventh grade. She keeps it in her contacts under his first name, not under Dad.

Travis came along when she was seven. He sells seed corn and soybeans out of a pole shed north of town, and he came in to the clinic where I work to have a cracked molar looked at.

I am a dental hygienist. I cleaned his teeth for two years before he asked me to supper, and he told me later that he had scheduled his six month cleanings at five months to see me sooner.

On our second date he asked if he could meet Kaylee. Not to impress me.

He said he would not keep seeing a woman with a little girl unless the little girl was all right with him being around.

Kaylee interviewed him at the kitchen table like a county commissioner. Did he have a dog. Did he know how to braid hair. Did he like the Twins. He said yes, no, and only when they win.

He learned to braid hair that summer. He practiced on a length of baler twine tied to a cabinet knob in the seed shed.

I know because I caught him at it once and he turned red to his ears.

We married when she was eight. She called him Travis then and she calls him Travis now.

Neither of them ever made a thing of it, and I never pushed. I thought it was working.

He drove her to every practice since seventh grade, an hour each way when the club team practiced in Mankato.

He built her a hitting net out of fence posts and old cargo netting behind the shed.

He sat through every match. He kept stats on a clipboard nobody asked him to keep.

He knows her kill percentage better than her coach does, and he has never once called himself her dad.

That last part I took for respect. I thought he was being careful with her, giving her room.

I did not understand, until that Thursday, that a man can be careful for so long it turns into fear.

After supper Tuesday, Travis went out to the shed. He does that when he has something on his mind.

He says he is checking inventory, but there is not much inventory to check in October.

I went upstairs and knocked on Kaylee’s door. She said come in. She was lying on her bed with her shoes still on, which she knows I hate, looking at the ceiling fan.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Because I don’t want to.”

I sat on the edge of the bed.

Her room smells like the vanilla body spray every girl in her class wears and like the knee pads she keeps forgetting to air out. I did not mention the knee pads.

After a while she said, “He’s not wrong, you know. He’s not my real dad. I just thought, I don’t know. I thought it didn’t matter anymore.”