The Cowbell at the Two Mile Mark

It felt like signing for a package that had been sent to the wrong house.

Coach Haakenson took the form and slid it into her folder. Then she looked at me for a second longer than she had to.

“Where are you going to stand?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never been to state. Wherever they let me.”

“Stand at the two-mile mark,” she said. “Everybody stands at the finish. The finish doesn’t matter, they’re running on fumes by then. Two miles is where they decide who they are. That’s where she’ll need you.”

I said I would. I did not know yet what she meant. I found out.

Friday afternoon I picked Ainsley up at the school at two thirty with our bags already in the trunk.

The sky was that hard pale blue it gets in late October, not a cloud anywhere, and the wind was out of the northwest pushing the car along.

We got on the interstate going east. One hundred and eighty miles to Sioux Falls. I had driven it maybe four times in my life, always for a doctor’s appointment, never for anything good.

We crossed the Missouri at Chamberlain, the river wide and dark blue and whitecapped from the wind. Ainsley looked out at the water.

Kurt had taught her to fish on that river when she was six, off the rocks below the bridge.

“Do you think he’s catching anything?” she asked.

“I don’t know, honey,” I said. “I hope he is.” And I meant it, which surprised me. I wanted him to catch fish. I just wanted him to have been somewhere else.

East of the river the country opened up. Corn harvest was mostly done, the fields cut down to stubble with the geese working them.

Pheasant hunters’ trucks were parked at the edges of the shelterbelts, dog boxes in the beds, men in blaze orange walking the ditches.

I said I did not know. She said Coach had told her it was flat and fast, along a river, with one little hill right before two miles.

Around Mitchell she told me Coach said the course was flat and fast, along a river, with one little hill right before two miles. “That’s the part I’m scared of,” she said. “Not the hill. After the hill. When it hurts.”

“Coach said that’s where I should stand,” I told her.

She looked at me then, really looked. “You’re going to stand there?”

“I’m going to stand there and ring a cowbell,” I said. “A lady at work gave it to me. Well, loaned it. She rang it at her boys’ ballgames for twenty years. She’s going to be praying for you at eleven o’clock.”

Ainsley turned and looked out the window at the stubble fields going by, and I saw her wipe her eye with the back of her wrist where she thought I could not see.

We got to Sioux Falls a little after five, still light, the sun low and orange behind us.

I had booked a room at a motel off the interstate, eighty-nine dollars with the breakfast, two queen beds and a heater under the window that rattled.

Ainsley laid her uniform out on the bed like it was church clothes. The royal blue singlet, the black shorts, her spikes, the racing socks with the little blue stripe.

Her race number was on a paper square with a timing chip on the back, and she had four safety pins for it.