The Last Ten Feet on Senior Night

I told him the junior varsity game started at five thirty and senior night would be right after, around a quarter to seven.

He said he would be there by six, and he was never late to anything in his life.

“Dad,” I said. “You’d have to walk all the way across the gym floor. It’s a long way with the cane.”

“I walked a lot farther than that in a snowstorm to get to the barn,” he said. “I suppose I can make it across a gymnasium for my granddaughter.”

I did not tell Travis that night. I want to be honest about that, too. I could have told him.

He would have known what it meant, and maybe he would have changed his mind before the game.

But then it would have been the same thing as making him.

A man changing his mind because his father in law was about to show him up. I did not want that either.

So I let him go to bed not knowing. He kissed me goodnight like always.

He set his alarm for 5:15 like always. He did not say anything about Kaylee, and I did not either.

I lay awake and listened to him breathe and wondered what kind of woman sets up her own husband to be embarrassed in front of the whole school.

I did not have a good answer. I still don’t, entirely.

Thursday I cleaned teeth from eight to four. Mrs. Bauer, who is eighty-four and has had the same partial plate since the Carter administration, told me she would 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 is a consolidated district, three little towns that merged back in the nineties when none of them could field a football team alone.

There are about four hundred kids in the whole building, kindergarten through twelfth grade.

Six seniors on the volleyball team that year. When you have six, everybody knows every one of them by name.

I picked Mason up from his after school program at four thirty.

He had made a poster in art class that said Go Kaylee with a picture of a volleyball that 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 had on 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, and he sat down beside me in the front row without saying much.

The gym smelled like popcorn and floor wax and that hot electrical smell the old scoreboard makes when it has been on for an hour.

The booster club had hung maroon and gold streamers along every railing.

Each of the six seniors had a poster on an easel by the scorer’s table, with her number and her picture.

Kaylee’s showed her in midair at a home game last fall, her braid flying behind her like a rope.

On the table there was a bucket of red roses from the flower shop on Main.

Each senior would carry one out and hand it to whoever walked her. That is how it has been done here as long as anybody remembers.

Travis looked at the roses and then looked away. I saw him do it.