The Last Ten Feet on Senior Night

And that is when my father did the thing I will think about for the rest of my life.

Kaylee had given him the rose. She had put it in his hand the second they stopped at center court, the way the other girls had given theirs to their parents.

He had 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 did not take it at first.

He shook his head a little, like he was telling Dad no, that was yours, you earned it, you walked the whole way.

My father did not lower his arm. He just kept holding it out, patient, the way he used to hold out a bottle to a stubborn calf until it decided on its own.

I was close enough to hear what he said, because the gym had gone so quiet. He said, “I already raised mine, son. 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, planted the cane, and started back across the floor by himself.

Somebody went out to help him. One of the junior varsity girls, a sophomore I did not know.

He let her walk beside him, but he did not take her arm. He made it to the end of the bleachers on his own.

Then he climbed the four steps, one at a time, hand on the rail, and sat down in the front row next to me.

He was breathing hard. He reached over and patted my knee twice.

“Well,” he said. “That went all right.”

I could not answer him. I just put my head on his shoulder, on that tan Sunday sport coat that still smelled faintly like cedar from the closet, and I cried like I had not cried since my mother died.

Down on the floor, the girls’ coach had come out with her phone to take the picture.

Travis and Kaylee stood by 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 said into the microphone, “Come on, Jodi, bring them down,” and everybody laughed.

So we went down. Dad, Mason, and me. Dad took the stairs a second time without complaint.

And that picture, the five of us at center court under the maroon and gold streamers, is the one on our refrigerator now.

Mason is holding his pumpkin volleyball poster upside down in it. Nobody noticed until we got it printed. We left it.

We did not talk about it in the truck on the way home.

Mason fell asleep against the window before we got to the edge of town. Kaylee rode with her friends to the team’s pizza party.

Travis drove with both hands on the wheel. The rose lay on the dashboard, rolling a little on the curves.

He did not say a word for eleven miles, and I did not either.

When we got home, I carried Mason up to bed and came back down.

Travis was sitting at the kitchen table, in the same chair he sat in on Tuesday, with the rose in front of him on the oilcloth.