The Cowbell at the Two Mile Mark

“Did you hear it?” I said into her hair.

“Mom,” she said. “Everybody heard it. The whole state heard it.”

“What did you hear?”

She pulled back and looked at me. Her face was red and wet and she was half laughing.

“I heard you say that’s my girl,” she said. “I was going to quit. Right at the top of that hill. I was going to let them go. And I heard the bell and I heard you, and I thought, she drove a hundred and eighty miles. I can’t quit in front of her.”

I could not answer that. I just held on to her again, right there in the middle of everybody.

Coach Haakenson found us twenty minutes later at the team tent. She had a clipboard in one hand and a cup of coffee she had not touched in the other. She hugged Ainsley hard, and then, to my surprise, she hugged me.

“Two miles,” she said to me. “Told you.”

“You did.”

“Her split from two miles to the finish was the fastest on our whole team. Boys included.” She shook her head. “I’ve coached a long time. I’ve never seen a kid change gears like that at state.”

Then she looked at me with that same look she had given me in the gym on Thursday, the one that went a little longer than it had to.

“How much sleep did you get this week, Mrs. Mertz?”

“Some,” I said.

“Two of my boys are riding home with their folks,” she said. “That frees up two seats on the bus. You and Ainsley ride home with the team. You’re not driving a hundred and eighty miles on no sleep.”

“I’ve got my car here.”

“Odell’s going to drive it,” she said, and pointed.

Odell was the grandpa of one of our boys, a retired grain elevator man from our town, a big slow quiet man in a feed cap and a canvas coat.

He had driven up by himself in his pickup that morning, and his grandson’s folks were going to drive the pickup home.

He came over and held out his hand for my keys. He did not make a speech. He did not make a fuss.

“I’ll have it at the school by the time you get in,” he said. “I’ll fill it up in Mitchell. You ride with the kids.”

I tried to give him money for the gas. He looked at the twenty in my hand like it was something I had found in the road, and he put both hands in his coat pockets and walked away toward my car.

Before the bus left, I went out to the car to get our bags out of the trunk. Ainsley came with me.

The parking lot was bright and cold, and the wind had come up off the river and was snapping the team tents.

They had given the top twenty-five girls in her class a medal on a blue and gold ribbon at the awards stand.

She had stood up there in her warmups with the other girls and bent her head for it, and I had rung that bell one more time, and the girls next to her had laughed.

At the car, while I was lifting the bags out of the trunk, she reached up and took the ribbon off her own neck.

Then she stood on her toes and put it over my head, over my knit cap, and settled the medal on the front of my red coat.

“Ainsley, no. That’s yours. You earned that.”