The Last Ten Feet on Senior Night

“It doesn’t,” I said.

“It does to him, apparently.”

I put my hand on her ankle. She let me leave it there.

She is seventeen, and those moments when she lets me leave my hand anywhere are fewer than they used to be.

“Who do you want to walk you out?” I asked. “Not who you’re supposed to want. Who.”

She thought about it longer than I expected. Then she said, “Can Grandpa do it?”

My father is Duane Ostrem. He is seventy-nine years old.

He milked Holsteins on the same quarter section east of town for fifty-one years, twice a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

He sold the herd in 2011, the spring after my mother died.

He said the cows did not need a man who talked to them that much. He still lives on the place and still gets up at 4:30.

He had his left hip replaced two winters ago and has walked with a cane since.

It is a plain wooden cane, hickory, with a rubber tip he replaces from the farm store when it wears through.

Kaylee spent every summer of her childhood following him around that farm.

She learned to drive in his old Ford pickup in the hayfield when she was eleven, the same summer her father stopped calling.

“Grandpa walks really slow now,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I don’t care. I want it to be him. And Mom, I want it to be just him. Is that okay? I want him to have it by himself.”

That stung a little, I will admit. But I understood.

I would be in the bleachers, and I would see it, and I would not have to be the one holding her together on the way across the floor.

“I’ll call him tomorrow,” I said.

The next morning I called the activities director, Mrs. Larson, from the clinic between my eight o’clock and my nine o’clock.

Every senior turns in a form with the names of the people who will walk her out.

Kaylee’s form had said Jodi and Travis. I had filled it out the week before without thinking. Mrs. Larson asked me what name to put instead, and I said, “Duane Ostrem. Her grandfather.”

There was a pause on the line.

“Oh, that’ll be nice,” she said. And then, carefully, because it is a small town and she was not born yesterday, “Is everything all right at home?”

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Kaylee asked for her grandpa.”

That was true. It just was not all of it.

Wednesday night after supper I called Dad. He picks up on the fourth ring every time, because the phone is on the wall in the kitchen and his recliner is in the front room.

I told him all of it. Travis, the supper, the words real dads. He did not interrupt.

He listened the way he used to listen to a cow that was off her feed, quiet and patient.

When I was done, he did not say a word about Travis. He did not ask what was wrong with that man, the way some fathers would have. He asked one question.

“Does Travis know you’re asking me?”

“No,” I said.

He was quiet for a while. I could hear the clock over his stove ticking. That clock has been ticking in that kitchen since before I was born.

“Well,” he said. “What time do I need to be there?”