The Cowbell at the Two Mile Mark

She pinned it on the singlet, took it off, moved it half an inch, and pinned it again. Then she checked every pin twice.

I sat on the other bed and watched her and did not say a word. Some things a girl has to do herself.

I paid with my debit card and did the math in my head on the way back to the room, the motel and the gas and the supper, and decided I did not care.

Saturday I woke at first light, with the sun coming in gold around the edges of the motel curtain and the heater ticking.

I heard her move over to the edge of her bed. Then her hand came across the gap between the two beds and found mine.

She used to do that when she was six, after Kurt and I had first started fighting and she was scared of the noise.

She would come to the edge of the bed in the mornings and hold my hand until the house was quiet.

“Thanks for coming, Mom,” she said, with her eyes still shut.

“I wouldn’t be anywhere else,” I said. And I held her hand until the alarm went off, and then a while longer, because I could.

It was cold and clear. Thirty-one degrees on the bank sign when we drove past it, and the sun just up over the rooftops on the east side of town. The sky was so blue it hurt.

I wore my red puffer coat, the one I bought on sale at the farm store two winters ago, and a black knit cap pulled down over my ears and black gloves.

I had the cowbell in a grocery sack. It was brass and heavy, as big as a coffee can, with a leather strap gone dark and soft from fifty years of hands.

The course was laid out across a big park along the river on the edge of town.

Grass mowed short, orange flags on wire stakes marking the turns, and rope lines strung along both sides of the route on metal posts so the crowd would stay off the runners.

Team tents in every color. Parents in stocking caps and blankets with coffee from the gas station, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands.

Ainsley went off with Coach Haakenson to warm up. She jogged away across the grass in her warmups, her light brown ponytail bouncing, and she turned back once and waved. Then she was gone into all those other kids.

I stood there holding the grocery sack and did not know where to go. I did not know anyone.

Kurt had always been the one who knew everybody at things like this, the one who would shake hands and slap backs. I had always stood behind him.

“Jolene!”

It was Britt, whose boy ran fourth for our boys’ team. She was standing at the rope with three or four of the other boys’ moms, all of them bundled up, a thermos going around.

She was waving both arms over her head like she was flagging down a plane.

“Get over here,” she said when I walked up. “We saved you a spot. We’re going to the two-mile mark after the boys go. Coach said that’s where you’d be.”

Nobody asked me where Kurt was. Not one of them. They just moved over on the rope and made room, and somebody handed me the thermos lid full of coffee, and somebody else asked me if Ainsley had slept, and that was all.