The Forty Miles to Speech Therapy

Shane came in about five minutes later and sat down on her other side. He nodded to me. I nodded back. He looked like he hadn’t slept.

The kindergartners came out in a line from the hallway, wearing paper flower hats they’d made in art. Ava’s was yellow, to go with her sweater.

She was eleventh in line. She scanned the folding chairs the whole time she walked, and when she found me, her shoulders came down about an inch.

They sang two songs first, all together, and she sang every word clean. I could hear her over the others, or I thought I could.

Then Mrs. Harmon brought the microphone out on its stand and set it at kindergarten height, and the lines began.

“My name is Carter, and in the spring I like to plant beans.”

“My name is Lily, and in the spring my dad goes fishing.”

Then the little girl before Ava sat down, and it was Ava’s turn.

She walked up to that microphone in her yellow sweater and her paper flower hat. She looked out at two hundred people in that gym.

I watched her face start to tighten, the way it always did. I watched her squeeze her eyes shut.

Then she opened them, and she found me.

I didn’t wave. I didn’t mouth anything. I just looked right back at her the way I look at her in the rearview mirror, on the long straight stretch past the Henley place.

She let a little breath out. I saw it. Just a little sigh, like fogging up a window.

“Hhhhh, my name is Ava Tolliver, and in the spring I help my grandma count the cows.”

She said every word of it clean. Not one stop. Not one catch. And on the word “grandma,” she looked straight at me and didn’t look away until she’d said “cows.”

I have been to a lot of programs in that gym. Becca’s, when she was small. My nephews’.

I have never heard that room clap the way it clapped for Ava, and most of those people had no idea why it mattered. Mrs. Harmon did. She was crying at the side of the stage.

Becca was on her feet. I don’t remember standing, but I was standing too.

And Shane was standing. He had to. Everybody in our row was, and everybody in the row behind. He stood there clapping for his daughter with his big sunburned hands, and his face was the color of a brick.

He was looking at me. Not at Ava. At me. I looked back at him for one second, and then I looked at Ava again, because she was the only one who mattered in that room.

Ava walked back to her spot in line. She didn’t run. She walked very carefully, holding her paper hat on with one hand, and she was smiling so wide I could see the gap where her front tooth had come out the week before.

Becca called me at 11:20. I was still awake. I hadn’t even tried.

“He told me,” she said. She’d been crying, and she sounded tired all the way down to her feet. “All of it. Mom, he lost his job a year ago April.”

The co-op had cut the second shift at the feed mill and let six men go, and Shane was one of the six.

He’d gotten two weeks’ severance and a letter about his insurance that he put in the glove box of the truck and never showed her.